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Donis Dayán Llago

Artist Statement

With my series of publicity images I try to speak in a humorous or satirical way about the ideological situation in which Cuba, in this case, shows its supposed treasures to the world in elaborate images of its best vistas and circumstances—keeping in mind the retouching done, and the reiterations of the images over the years as if everything were stopped in time, and in the best circumstances the beauty through the camera’s lens would make people believe they had entered landscapes from another dimension. That is why I take images from magazines of the 1980s to today. With the everyday action of discarding and recuperating, which happen every day, I try to demystify the paradigm I propose evoking, creating a new, unreal image with an other beauty that is charged with the island’s stigma. The same happens in the facades series, where the wall of the Malecón carries the stigma of being the imperishable icon of Cuban society. In these images I aim for the wall itself carries the real existential protagonism that is attributed to it; the wall is what transforms into something pre-made, into an ordinary object, with the objective of telling the story it has lived itself because of its important geographic location, as the border between life and the long road to an imaginary (or reality) beyond, keeping in mind what Lezama said about the damned or blessed circumstance of water being everywhere.

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