The exhibition The Language Game (the language game) opens this Friday to the public in Kendall (Miami-Dade) with 40 works by artists with mental disabilities focused on the text as plastic expression, something present in the so-called “art outsider” since 1919.
“If you get to see, include texts in the collages It is very contemporary and they have been doing it since 1919, according to the book Expressions of Madness: The Art of the Mentally Illby (the German psychiatrist) Hans Prinzhorn”, says Juan Martín, executive director of the National Art Exhibitions of the Mentally Inc (NAEMI) foundation, in charge of the exhibition.
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“We wanted to set up this exhibition to continue talking about the importance of art outsider within contemporary art at the moment, which is something that tends to be ignored”, says the collector, who has been buying and exhibiting this type of art since 1989.
Martín says that he had been looking for a gallery for “more than a year” for this exhibition, which includes paintings and installations by creators from the United States, Spain and Cuba made with mixed media and with “99%” of the pieces not exhibited so far. .
Words, a common denominator
It was the Kendall Art Center, owned by the American businessman of Cuban origin Leonardo Rodríguez, who has given him space in his small warehouse converted into a gallery, in the confines of southern Miami near an executive airport, where at first glance there seems to be no activity. cultural.
“The exhibition proposes a game of language with the works, a game that expands paraliterary inquiries. In these works, the text is the central motif, acting not only as a poetic entity but also as an essential aesthetic element”, the curator reviews in the catalog of the sample, the American Lyle Rexer.
Pen drawings, watercolours, collages, installations where a practically disused telephone booth appears in the world; a vanity case hanging from the ceiling with the title ‘Today’s Dreams’; figurative and abstract art go hand in hand with a common denominator: words.
“The curator and I were very intrigued by how these people work with texts,” says Martín, who treasures 1,200 works of art outsider in NAEMI’s permanent collection and is looking for an exchange partner.
Martín first shows a work by the Cuban artist Misleidys Castillo, who in addition to having “major psychiatric problems” is deaf and dumb.
“We noticed that she always included the letters E, A and N in her work, which at first only showed men’s bodies. The mother still doesn’t know what these letters mean,” says Martín, who never ceases to be amazed by Castillo’s works. .
She exhibits a single piece, “Meieoaof”, a mixed technique on paper that shows an androgynous and muscular figure with a male body and a female face apparently of some animal.
Misleydis was one of the artists who participated in the exhibition in 2019 Flying High: Women Artists of Art Brutat The Bank Austria Kunstforum, in Vienna, and is represented by a French gallery that has specialized in outsider art, outsider or roughjust like other NAEMI artists.
A tapped phone booth
“A work that I love”, comments Marín, “is that of (the Spaniard) Ramón Losa, ‘Diario de Albacete’, a series that begins with a figurative work where the text eats up everything that is figure, and at the end ends with a completely abstract work,” says the collector.
Martín goes from one side of the gallery to the other until he stops in front of a telephone booth “intervened” by the Cuban Jorge Alberto Hernández Cadi, artistically known as “The diver”.
“Speed up the disaster”, which also adds different texts to an old public telephone, is an installation on a pedestal that according to the collector “has been very difficult to carry”.
Next to it is another piece by Hernández Cadi that presents a mountain of books with new titles glued to their spines. “Skewered by time”, “Unfinished psychological warfare” and “Careful, it could be CULTURE!”, are some of the “books” of “El buzo”, a nickname given to garbage collectors in Cuba.
According to the catalog, “El Buzo” has been diagnosed with schizophrenia for more than two decades.
“The Cry, My Chaos to Meby American Bill Seeger, is a parody of the well-known painting “The Scream”, by Norwegian Edvard Munch.
The favorite work of Rodríguez, the host gallery owner, is a collage by the American artist Candice Avery, “Survival of the fittest” (Survival of the fittest), which refers to the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin.
“It’s not that we’re all crazy, but the passion that these artists put into what they do is enough to inspire anyone who hasn’t made art to become a creator,” says Rodríguez. (I)
Source: Eluniverso
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