Tres tristes tigres: Manuel Castillo, Luis López-Chávez, Leandro Feal

Bode is pleased to present Tres tristes tigres, a group exhibition of Manuel Castillo, Luis López-Chávez, and Leandro Feal, curated by Liatna Rodríguez in Havana. 

 

Tres tristes tigres (eng. “Three Sad Tigers”) is a group exhibition encompassing photography, video, and installation. This triad, used as a pretext,  brings together three contemporary artists, three friends who meet in Havana to talk about their times, their realities, their losses.

 

Language is the core point of the show, and thus the attempt to turn the word into an image. Feal, Castillo and López-Chávez are artists who share their personal artistic practices, and pay a marked interest to the contexts from which their works are originated. The artists work with the material that lives in the streets and in the sounds, inside people and their complaints, in the absences and in the losses that mark them – all these are then projected into their works.

 

The title Tres tristes tigres is a reference to the novel by Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante, as well as to the film by Chilean Raúl Ruiz, based on the book. This reference, however, can not only be found in the title itself, but also in what the novel provokes us to see and think about: the history of a city and its people, the day and nightlife, the sea, the sadness of the losses, as well as resignation.

 

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Luis E. López-Chávez (b. 1988, Manzanillo, CU) creates works crossed by unavoidable references to the universes of literature, philosophy and cinema. This conceptual painter is known for a profound research that he deploys within his work, e.g. the series that orbit the themes of emptiness, the archeology of memory, the categorical relationships between form and content. López-Chávez’s work moves from painting to installation, from installation to video, from video to object production based on expressive needs that transcend the mandates of the medial imperative. López-Chávez graduated from the Academia Profesional de Artes Plásticas in Manzanillo, CU and from the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana, CU. In 2012, he received a scholarship from the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm, SE; and also participated at the 12th Havana Biennial, Havana, CU. López-Chávez’ work have been featured in several solo exhibitions at Unión Nacional de Arquitectos e Ingenieros de la Construcción de Cuba, Havana, CU; Galería El Apartamento, Havana, CU; Galería Servando, Havana, CU; Museo Droguería Johnson, Havana, CU; Galería Evolución, Lima, PE. He has participated at numerous group shows, including at Bode, Havana, CU and Berlin, DE; Galleria Continua, Paris, FR, and São Paulo, BR; Palazzina dei Bagni Misteriosi-Teatro Franco Parenti, Milan, IT; Le CENTQUATRE-PARIS, Paris, FR; The Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, SE. Luis López-Chavez lives and works in Havana, CU.

 

Manuel Castillo (b. 1990, Santiago de Chile, CL) works mainly with photography and video, using these two means of expression to look at himself and thus understand the physical space in which we move. His work is often intuitive and rarely works through a predetermined concept. Castillo says he is interested in the organic interactions between what he lives as a daily experience, memories, and the environment that surrounds him. For this he looks for elements found on the street, in the sea, as well as in countries in conflict, all of this to decontextualize them and propose a new visual narrative through the creation.

 

Leandro Feal (b. 1986, Havana, CU) has been continuously practicing the exercise of documenting his own perspective for two decades. Feal assumes that the gesture of photographing is much more than keeping a constant record of what he considers closest and almost every day. He tries to persistently follow the lines of what he wants to look at, and to never forget that using the camera, that ethical device, modifies us in a sense that we cannot always understand. From the exercise of trying to capture what you see, images emerge, sequences where you freeze moments that will not return, faces and landscapes that we may not see again, or, on the contrary, situations or people that are repeated over and over again in the time, even in different places around the world. These sequences inevitably generate narratives. By extracting those small glimpses where what was experienced and witnessed become fixed images, he begins to give meaning to these stories, to define and outline them through the montage technique. Ultimately, what he seeks in his photos is the moment of persistence, the shadow of a shudder, or the order of those misplacements that are sometimes our most unmistakable quality.