The epochal Volumen I exhibition opened at the Centro de Arte Internacional in Havana in 1981, launching a new generation of artists—Torres Llorca, José Bedia, and Flavio Garciandía among them—into the vanguard of a new Cuban art movement. Collectively, these artists broke with what had become a stale national artistic tradition, ushering in a period of radical experimentation that saw new critically- and socially-engaged art practices as well as the inaugural Havana Biennial in 1984.

The present work casts back to this foundational moment, centering a historical photograph taken in 1981 of most of the Volumen I artists alongside the critic Lucy Lippard and Ana Mendieta. “In the early 1980s, [Mendieta] brought Lucy Lippard and [artist] Rudolph Baranik to the island,” Torres Llorca later reminisced. “They were absolutely astonished to find that the art of a Communist country had not fallen into the pit of social realism, and upon returning to their country they said that the works seemed taken from SoHo. We became the dream of the American left” (quoted in L. Fontana, “Rubén Torres Llorca: entrevista con artista,” Arte al Día 102, April 2004). Here, Torres Llorca stages the photograph against a kitschy decorative ground and between two electrical devices. The cord dangling between them suggests a frustrated timeline between the extraordinary creative energy of 1981 and the generational entropy that had set in by 1987. This work takes its title from a line in Pablo Neruda’s famed “Poema 20” (1924), a love poem of profound longing and disaffection.

Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park