HAVANA.- GALLERIA CONTINUA Havana is presenting Muro de sonido (Wall of Sound), a solo exhibition by Cuban artist José Yaque. This pictorial and spatial immersion engages in dialogue with energy, matter and the vibration of color.


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For several years, Yaque has developed a deep interest in the study of minerals and tectonic formations of the Earth, exploring the origin of color from mineral pigments. In his works, he has evoked the geological processes that shape the natural world and has captured the energy of nature from its entrails. This fascination with geology has translated into a methodology where paint flows freely, mixes and settles with autonomy, allowing chance and gravity to play a crucial role in the construction of the image. In this way, he obtains an organic relationship between the different acting elements, and the resulting painting becomes a reflection of the processes of nature.

On this occasion, his lyrical abstraction has expanded his horizons and the colors have emerged from the sediments to the Earth’s surface. The artist is enthusiastic about the idea of painting as nature paints rather than seeking realism in representation. Thus, the center of the gallery is occupied by a river of pigments that seems to be born from the distillation of colors generated from the entrance. It is a pictorial spring that sprouts and expands freely, appropriating the space and generating chromatic combinations almost independently. The sea, the river, the water obtain protagonism: not only for the tones that can be perceptible but for the flow that is generated in the form of painting and that intervenes the main room of the gallery more than simply occupying it. The exhibition becomes a great landscape where each work pays tribute to a new step in the pictorial inquiries within the artist’s career.

José Yaque experiments here with a new way of looking at the landscape. In his works, the landscape is not a figurative representation, but is rather constructed as an allusive landscape, a testimony of the energies, forces and vibrations of different places visited by the artist and which served as inspiration for his paintings. Thus, he works with the idea that nature is not only a theme in painting, but that painting itself can be conducted as a natural process. The artist takes references from native areas, such as the Salinas de Brito (Brito Salt Flats) in Ciénaga de Zapata (Zapata Swamp), from which he extracts the stimulus that the different tonalities provoke and of which he only leaves a slight hint in the pieces’ titles.

Also inspired by the concept of the “wall of sound” generated in the field of music in the sixties of the last century, the artist seeks to translate the intensity, resonance and immersion of sound into painting. The large installation and the paintings exhibited for this show function as visual chords, where the superimposition of layers and the fluidity of the material generate a sensation of almost audible vibration. This approach allows the viewer to “hear” the painting through the vibration of color and composition, expanding preset boundaries and amplifying the senses.

The viewer not only has the opportunity to observe the work, but to walk through it, experience it and immerse him / herself in it, as if he/ she were within the pictorial landscape itself.

Muro de Sonido (Wall of Sound) invites viewers to experience painting not only as a visual representation, but as an energy in itself, a flow of matter and sensations that envelops them. The exhibition seeks to expand the limits of perception and provoke in the public a reflection on the relationship between art, matter and natural elements.

José Eduardo Yaque Llorente was born in Manzanillo, Cuba in 1985. He currently lives and works in Havana. He studied at “ Carlos Enríquez ” Professional Academy of Fine Arts in Manzanillo (2005) and the Higher Institute of Art (ISA) in Havana (2011). In 2010 he participated in the first Biennial of Contemporary Art in Portugal and exhibited at Wasps Artists’ Studios, in Glasgow, Scotland. In 2012 he won a residence in Warsaw where he exhibited in the Zacheta Project Room of the National Gallery of Art, as part of the collective exhibition “ Fragmentos ”. In 2017, he took part in the collective exhibition of the Cuban Pavilion, in Palazzo Loredan, at the 57th Venice Biennale.

Among his solo exhibitions, we mention : Eruzione , GALLERIA CONTINUA, San Gigmignano (2023); Maturation, GALLERIA CONTINUA, Rome (2020); El dilema del ciempensamientos, Colegio de Arquitectos (UNAICC), Havana (2019) ; Alluvione ´Arno, Villa Pacchiani Exhibition Centre, Santa Croce sull´Arno, Pisa (2017) ; Scavare, GALLERIA CONTINUA, San Gimignano, Italy (2015). Group exhibitions that feature his work include : Kaleidoscopes - Cuba : regards contemporains, GALLERIA CONTINUA, Les Moulins, France (2024) ; You know who you are : Recent Acquisitions of Cuban Art from the Jorge Pérez Collection, El Espacio 23, Miami, USA (2022) ; Commanderie de Peyrassol. Nouvelles installations permanents, France, 2021; Art Basel Unlimited, Basel (2018) ; Cuban Art Now , Singer Laren Museum, Amsterdam (2017) ; Queen Anne´s lacy , Wasserman Projects, Detroit (2017); The meantime , Voorlinden Museum, Wassenaar, The Hague, Netherlands (2017); Transhumance , CAB Art Center, Brussels (2016); Wind and Art Don’t Care about Border, Metropolitan Art Society, Beirut (2015); Anclados en el territorio, GALLERIA CONTINUA, Havana (2015) ; Senderos de Bosque, Emerson College / Ruskin East G. Floor, Forest Road, England, UK (2013).


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