History as a show in the art workshop of López Oliva

Those who attend the 13 Havana Biennial and those interested in genuine art from our country will be able to visit - during a month of celebration of the visual arts - the art workshop of the Cuban creator and intellectual Manuel López Oliva. There, in the fourth patrimonial corner of a seventeenth-century colonial mansion based in Leonor Pérez (Paula) and Calle Habana, within the historic Havana hacienda humanized by the Office of the Historian, you will be able to appreciate not only some of this artist's distinctive works, but also at the same time, the characters of his scope of work and other visions derived from his career.

The title chosen for what will work as another Open Studio collateral of the expanded cultural event, is due to Deney Terry-curator and professional assistant of López Oliva- which thus adds to the space in question a group of achievements of Gecer López García, a young engraver and painter and equally artificer of Video Art. If the thematic and metaphorical codes of López Oliva are nourished by the theatricality and the masquerades, those of Gecer make their circus referents. However, in both there is a substantial link that converts the works into products of thought: the historical matter that they manage, disguise, convert into an actor's plot and establish as a proposal for the intelligent reading of the spectators.

What in that place will be made available to Cubans and foreigners, is not a sample deliberately conceived as exhibition, nor an environmental design with competitive signs of an opulence that draws on Saxon models, but the daily being and happening of a workshop in which the daily effort engenders aesthetic germinations. Sowed in an area somewhat removed from the sumptuous and beautifully restored perimeter that was once the habitat of Spain's Captains General, great merchants, renowned tailors and a swarm of financial firms, this OPEN STUDY by López Oliva conveys, in spirit and context, values ​​of a popular vernacular tradition; besides being close to the house where José Martí was born, one of the homes of that Loynás family of patriots and lawyers, and businesses that wove the legend of the famous pimp Yarini and that inspiring Rachel of Miguel Barnet's novel,

In History as a show they will contemplate paintings, drawings, serial graphics and videos. It will be an opportunity for the enjoyment of sensitive perception and the acquisition of those who collect or only seek to surround themselves with artistic qualities.

Any special interest of your visit, you can contact before by the workshop telephone (7862-6815) or by mail: lomani@cubarte.cult.cu