Magazine 32 (EN), Stories (EN)

Yunior La Rosa

Plurality of Matter

Por Nelson Herrera Ysla

It is attractive to think that from free-wheeling speculations on the well-known biblical phrase “all the glory of the world fits in a kernel of corn”, Yunior La Rosa builds his most recent aesthetic proposals –usually a singular universe of small-scale objects-, to discern the hallucinating power of ideologies in individual and collective behavior, seen through one of its most persevering mediators, the printed letter, whether in its traditional forms of posters, newspapers, books, pamphlets, or in logos that acquire, temporarily or permanently, symbolic capacity. Since the appearance of the printing press, all the ideas that existed and exist in the world have fought for their visibility to make themselves felt in the minds and hearts of every human being, using unsuspected, novel, attractive and seductive resources, both in verbal and non-verbal signs.

Such raw material, for centuries, has been acting in our daily life almost naturally, organically, as it is part of the social and political imaginary without our noticing it. This artist, aware of such power (dominant and hegemonic whatever its final expression and form) strives to show us its plurality and scope in the complex world of visuality that is increasingly expanding and surprising. But he relies on text, on words and on one of his favorite supports, paper, to instrumentalize a process of conscientization that he considers necessary to understand certain aspects of our daily lives, despite the empowerment that images have acquired today in vast spheres of knowledge and shared knowledge.

His artistic trajectory, however, was fundamentally objectual in its beginnings, appropriating domestic elements (pans, gas stoves, pins, candles) and elements of military symbology to endow them with new formal qualities and meanings, which he then photographed and converted into dazzling and illuminated digital prints in close-ups, validated even as portraits. His aim was to alert us to the many possibilities of new uses of these elements by adding to them a dose of humor and irony, interested also in the perspectives opened up when ingenuity and imagination become solid allies of artistic creation.

Heir to a conceptualism that assumes local codes and essences (almost a nationalization of it), his language is inscribed in that universal, global spirit that crosses borders and limits without asking permission and which seems impossible to avoid at this point with the impact of communication and social networks. Graduated in Plastic Arts at the San Alejandro Academy in Havana, he exhibits regularly in important institutions in Cuba and Mexico, and his works are part of several private collections on the island and abroad. His studies, on the other hand, in photography workshops in Cuba have led him to fundamentally master this expression and its techniques, as well as what he has learned in book binding and museography. 

This polyhedral formation is summarized in works that in his most recent stage denote synthesis and formal elaborations of impeccable workmanship. Just like the concepts from which he starts to build his discourse on the role of political documents, newspaper articles, slogans and symbols in society. Transformed into paper pulp ironizes its ideological effectiveness by converting this soft material into construction objects such as slabs, blocks, bricks, sifters, and exhibiting them in small and medium formats, or panels composed of many of them. The result is a process of aestheticization of the ideological as the only or possible way to consume so many ideas trapped in newspapers, books and magazines, after the objectives for which they were made have been fulfilled, and which he summarizes exemplarily in his recent body of work entitled Materia gris. 

The art of recycling adopts in Yunior La Rosa a mediating spirit, a spearhead towards paths that he contests by highlighting the suspicious usefulness of certain residues and wastes considered almost sacred by established power groups. When he made, years ago, his book-landscapes, he showed the possibilities of refunctionalization and transmutation from one state to another of the raw material with which he worked, also from a semiotic and polysemic replay that brings us closer to thinking about traces of a memory that is both distant and close at the same time. Now it disappears to become the basis and support of a subtle and refined discourse, typical of a conceptualism that allows itself luxuries and attractions such as the use of color and an intelligent balance through large panels on the wall, which makes it more attractive. The texts of some works contribute to this, in the form of plaques, to emphasize verbally what has been realized in two and three-dimensional images. The allusions to the national context, to an insistent continuity of ideologically obsolete paradigms, are striking in each work.

If it is a question of logos, then the artist deifies his planimetry in watercolors on cardboard that recall architectures and constructions, some of them labyrinthine, spatial, by also endowing them with a certain contemporary monumentalism, which denotes his skillful handling of the conventional instruments of drawing in sets assisted by formal synthesis. This marked plurality reveals a creator who is unprejudiced about the forms that his proposals must acquire regardless of the nature or qualification of the materials used. Anything goes, he seems to say, to move his ideas in any direction, including sculpture. 

The coherence and organicity of his aesthetic discourse, contributes to imagine a creator endowed with traditional and at the same time novel tools in the panorama of contemporary visual arts in Cuba. Difficult to include in the registers of hegemonic trends or currents, Yunior La Rosa contributes to shape a significant space that is outlined in some young creators by his exquisite morphological elaboration and the clarity of his ideas, the delicate handling of humor, irony, and away from banalities or cognitive superficiality.

Yunior La Rosa
Yunior La Rosa
Yunior La Rosa
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