Tomas Oliva Exhibition inaugurated in Havana

By Adalys Perez Suarez

After twelve years of his last exhibition in Cuba, the plastic artist Tomas Oliva opened this Thursday at the Casa Oswaldo Guayasamín in Old Havana the entitled Hay un presagio en el aire (There is an omen in the air), which was already exhibited in the United States, a country in which he resides for more than two decades ago.

Six large paintings --the majority done in mixed technic- and an installation are included in the exibition in which the artist proposes by the use of symbols a subtle approach to calls consciousness altered states from which he admits he conceived all of the pieces which he now exhibits.

For these jobs, which he performs in parallel with other series since 2000, he uses the signature TO TO, his repeated initials, referring to a splitting of his individuality in an attempt to live in two worlds: that of everyday reality and the other he looks through a consciousness altered state through music, fasting or silence.

In both, the paintings in which he maintains the influence of Goya and the German expressionism, and the facility dedicated to Czech writer Franz Kafka, Oliva takes the figure of the toilet, now gagged as symbol of private Western culture, despite all, to dispense of processes such as waste disposal metabolism.

Manipulation of these objects relating them with our Aboriginal cemí also nourishes this symbolism seen in the exibition as if it were a gasp of land that our ancestors returned to us as a warning of the urgency to examine ourselves.

Involve the audience with this proposal, who are considered the most important part; call the attention about aspects that for being apparently elementary our civilization overlooked them, are the main purposes of this exhibition, as the artist expresses to Cubarte.

Hay un presagio en al aire will be open to the public at the Casa Oswaldo Guayasamín until next October 29^th .

Source: Cubarte