A “Strange Attractor” with a Mocking Spirit and a Restless (Un)Quiet Soul.

By Claudia Taboada Churchman. Art critic and curator.

“The man in mourning was not Perón and the blonde doll was not Eva Duarte, but neither Perón was Perón nor Eva was Eva, but rather unknown or anonymous figures (whose secret names and true faces we ignore) who embodied, for the credulous love of the slums, a crude mythology.”
— Jorge Luis Borges, The Simulacrum, in Dreamtigers

Immersion into other realities becomes imminent; every detail conspires toward it, from the exhibition space itself to the very pieces it shelters: the house (gallery), the fragmentations of space (rooms), the canvases and objects (works), the pictorial openings (thematic windows), and every scene and character inhabiting them (discourses). Everything has been carefully conceived, calibrated to the exact measure of real stories affiliated with the fate of timeless narratives in fertile territories of coincidence, where intellectual revelry and critical reflection converge.

Rubén Alpízar’s work, beyond being read through the sharp insight and singular mockery embedded within each piece, becomes even more enjoyable when the artist assumes the very containing space itself as the perfect hyperlink to his poetics. This is precisely what The Room of Simulacrum is about: how an artist of mocking spirit and restless (un)quiet soul — as Antonio Machado once wrote — provokes polemics and debates regarding artistic and extra-artistic contexts through the logics of simulation characteristic of the contemporary world, or what Baudrillard termed the “museography of reality.”

Since the beginning of his career, Alpízar has worked through the vein of self-representation as an expression of self-recognition, but also as an exploration of a collective entity dissolved within the context of the absurd, where situations become attached to legends visually narrated through figurations recalling Bosch, for example, and scenes from medieval production; through postmodern language and its ambiguity; and through the artist’s particular ingenuity in synthesizing political, economic, social, and artistic discourses into windows or rooms that function like caricatured microworlds.

Within this simulacrum, several solid series from his production have been brought together, among them Small Bonds, What a Healthy Life, What a Perverse Mind, and Searching for Narcissus, through which he has drawn the spirit of a generation — the 1990s — that often preferred to speak, from the self, about collective concerns, even when its self-image remained symbolically evoked through the psychological traits of pivotal elements from Art History and culture in general.

Alpízar has understood that The Kiss is no longer Brancusi, that Three Trapped Tigers is no longer Cabrera Infante, that even he himself before the mirror is not the myth of Narcissus, nor is the room of fluid spaces truly the Gallery. Everything is cooked within a game of appearances that empowers the object and surrounds it with irony and cunning artifices, through which it ultimately undertakes a kind of revenge in which — according to the theorist of simulacrum in art — it becomes a “strange attractor,” as the term is used in physics.

Claudia Taboada Churchman

Exhibition Catalogue The Room of the Simulacrum, Villa Manuela Gallery, Havana, 2017.