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Rancaño through complimentary roads

Autor: Virginia Alberdi Benítez | Fuente: www.granma.cu | 28 de Mayo 2012

Contrary to the philosophy of Borges’ story, where choosing one way or the other between the separating roads changes the destiny of people, Ernesto Rancaño proposes us a surprising trip around the ways of symmetry and speculation that leads us to complementing the images.

His exhibition La otra mitad de mí mismo (My other half), which is part of the wonderful exhibition program collateral to the 11th Havana Biennial at La Cabaña Fortress, is to be seen in one of the vaults of the ancient building, as an installation, whose reading demands for continuity, although every single piece—or better said, each of the object situations—constitutes an independent metaphor.

The bed, the table, the suitcase, the place to wash up, everything that has been used, leads us to the exercise of the most rigorous and common everyday agenda. But the staging is deliberately filled with illusion. Each scene is just one half, which is complimented when it is reflected on a mirror, with such an iconographic precision that the image is doubled at a point that when the spectators watches it in front, he loses the idea of what is real and what is the reflection.

At this point, there are many questions in the head of the spectator, and there are many different possible answers, from the erosion of the rituals to the fragility of space as a physical and emotional category.

The reasons of the artist may be different ones. For him, it is enough having created parallel images with an identical visual sign. In his compositions, there is more than enough creativity to stand in an alternative scale to that he had ever presented to us in his career.

Even though, nothing comes from the sky. In the drawing and paintings by Rancaño, celebrated for the detailed cleanliness of the trace and a concentrated figurative definition, there was already to be seen this poetic deviation, which was made evident when using an installation criteria—the use of the mirror—in the announcement to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Lezama Lima in the collective exhibition Cantidades hechizadas, in the José Martí National Library.

Rancaño, seems to have ended a cycle with La otra mitad de mi vida. But you may never be sure of that. With an artist of such a high level, imagination and strictness, no one can ever be sure of how surprising his next steps might be.

Translation: Karen López (Cubarte)