I
When Irving Penn depicted to the famous North American jazzman Miles Davis he found a simple and personal way to give answer to the classic queries (who is) and (how ago) that we are surprised when we see a picture of somebody, he decided to take details of the hands and the sublime trumpet player’s fingers and with that he already told everything. The same happens to the faces, eyes, hair, textures of the skin, breasts, hips, and other fragments of the body that, without the necessity of evidencing expressions and/or actions that reinforce the fellow’s discovery a priori, demonstrate its capacity to speak for itself, that is to say, they identify us and they individualize of the rest, in dependence of the observation grade, of course.
But and the feet, generally camouflaged by different types of footwear, do they acquire an absolute silence? Doesn’t the fact of being contained most of the time maybe confer them voice neither I vote? If it is certain that like they say, “the shell also guards the stick,” it is of supposing that the identikit is not only in appreciating barefoot feet, or hands, or fingers. The identity transcends the limits of the human thing, the social thing and the cultural thing. It is not only individuals’ matter, but of generations. He melts in everything and it reaches a new dimension from the art. It is only necessary to look at the feet.
II
Baseboards, title of the personal exhibition carried out by the artist Lidzie Alvisa in the Gallery Villa Manuela of the UNEAC (May – June of 2011), she took as only main characters from that place to the feet. It surprises the disposition of the pieces. It is not common to arrive to a promoter place of plastic arts, as they are it the galleries, and hoping to find works everywhere (at least in the walls), to enter to probes due to the dimness of the enclosure and to see that it is seemingly empty. Then, to anyone it assaults him the doubt of the possible one it misleads in the face of a program change or something similar. But no, this it was not the case. With premeditated intention, like it is appreciated in the folding of the exhibition, solved in their majority with images created in 3D, the almost entirety of the sample lay level with floor. In an installation way, Lidzie located in the inferior ends of all the rooms, photographic impressions on flagstones that discovered feet or payees of an immense variety of shoes reproduced.
All were not located in the same position, some they were profiled in contrary senses, ready to leave in search of new roads, while others decided to remain static and to wait something or perhaps anything. Some were bundles; immolated by feelings, vicissitudes, reach illusions or no. Callous feet, with canes, because for the artist it is always important to include in their speech the presence of the time. As it is logical, time and life goes taken of the hand, it is worth to clarify now, of the feet.
The curatorial conception of the space in a same way included two enormous impressions, new feet tied to its customs, from the generational until the professional thing. The delivery to the profession, when this it is the one yearned; it demands big sacrifices to obtain results. Inviolable schedules, limitless passions, I respect and love that you/they should not abandon. This way, the tapes of their slippers hide the dancer’s feet. Equal happens to the cords of the classics you converse stuck to the grated stockings, imposing fashions and aesthetic likes, impulses and stubbornness, characteristic of the complex juvenile stage.
With the public’s presence it is accomplished the sample. In Baseboards they seem to have been placed mirrors. They are my feet, yours, those of anyone; it doesn’t care, beginning an incessant dialogue with those that have in front. The topics already know them, the economy and the society, the crisis and the fashion, the gender and the generations. In short, they could be many more and all to work on the whole. When being recognized the spectator in the work, by means of the feet, single lack to listen the whisper, a light voice that comments about who and how we are. A voice speaks for us, free of other ties.