The project "Estilo de vida" (Life Style) of the Cuban artist, Adrián Fernández, attempts to decipher some of the elements that make up the material and personal universe of a sector of "wealthy class" in the contemporary Cuba; distanced from the iconic image of the official discourse in the island. His goal is to penetrate in "immediate realities, fragmented and dispersed that exists or survives within the frame of social scheme where the conflicts and the problematic that outline the complex today's Cuban society converge."
By means of three photographic series he brings together different spaces and key elements for understanding the social and aesthetic dynamics ruling this social sector. This study is shaped by the facades of their houses, the interiors and some decorative objects that coexist in the domestic space and are separately studied in the photographic process.
From the series "Estilo de Vida (Life Style)"
The houses represented in the series correspond to neighborhoods constructed in the decades of 40 and 50 of the XX century. In accordance to the aesthetic and formal precepts of the Modern movement in arquitecture, the relationship of housing to the plot or batch was understood as free and fluid without barriers or visual closures or obstacles. In this sense gardens, galleries, portals were easily recognized from the sidewalk. The need to mark the boundaries between the private and public property rested on the complicity of classes and shared status in the society.
Today, a succession of fences, walls and grills separate the family micro-world from the reality outside. Rather than used in its decorative character, this is asociated to the idea of the house as a refugy from the social conventions, appearances and obligations. Not to see and not to be seen, or be seen as less as possible; seems to be the guiding principle from which the new architectural and visual perspectives of the urban environment are projected.
The use of the black and white is an element, by its own nature connotes the little information that is handled of everything that happens inside the house, from which we can just speculate; as white and black handles less information regarding the reality in terms of tones.
From the series "Retrato (Portrait)"
This series looks into the inside of the house, space that sometimes overrides contextual references; where the prevalent selection criterion is based on the symbolic patterns of comfort and status. The house may be the memory theater, and its parts are fragments of personal biography in the same way that the parts of the city are chapters of social history.
The use of color in the pictures extends the range of visual effects to recognize, in the same way that the interior offers more symbolic/decorative elements in dialogue with the house and its occupants. The amalgam of references in the set reveals the coexistence of past and present.
Each element is carefully placed for the photograph; as well as lights and flashes according to the different lighting effects. And the composition intents, well organized in the same plane, to bring together the sequence of textures and objects that resides in the portrayed space.
From the series "Del Ser o el Parecer" (To Be or to Pretend)"
Table decorations with fruits or flowers has become an exceptional protagonist of the Cuban interior; zhenit of the aesthetic pretensions and sign of the home identity. It is a discursive axis that summarizes the values repeated with less clarity in other decorative elements.
Tablecloths, dishes, and decorative bowls with fruits or usually artificial flowers bring an accumulation of visual textures that condense into a single aesthetic experience, not by default but excess.
What is important now is the preservation of the inherited or assumed image and values; and this explains the use of artifice rather than natural. Adrián attempt a dialogue around "the fragility of appearances, the relation between being and pretending. Human beings need to pretend and to project and image of themselves in order to be accepted within social norms and groups that modulate a sense of what's right, successful and beautiful." To be perceived is to exist.
On his words: "We wouldn't be anything without attributes, or as much, we would be something unrecognizable. Things are, beyond their original utilitarian character, symbolic attributes that express an identity: what differentiates one from another; legitimizes its condition of being, its status and its power.
Sara Alonso Gómez.
Art Historian
Adrián Fernández.
Visual Artist