STAND BY

Stand By.

It is a term used to describe being on hold or at rest, a reference adopted by certain electronic devices when they are not fully powered on.
In this state, the device remains on but in a minimal functioning mode, allowing it to power up quickly when it receives a command, a user signal.
It also refers to being in expectation of something.

This phrase partially describes the situation Cuba and its people find themselves in today.

A continued and structural crisis.

The citizen finds himself without tools to awaken, yet energy, intention, and hope persist despite everything.

In this exhibition, two visions of reality come together—different yet similar in their aptitude and convergence. We have Vladimir de León Llaguno (Vlado), an artist devoted to his pictorial practice for more than three decades. From his famed cave-studio, he returns the world to us through his gaze. With a visual poetics and a theme that is both coherent and diverse.
Vlado is a storyteller of pictorial narratives. Obsessions are manifested in his aesthetics, halfway between a graphic pop and forms that approach abstraction in his processes.
Thematically, the topics that move him emerge...
The journey, the individual in modern times, the relationship with nature of this same modern being. History, signs, symbols—all blend into a style that is both recognizable and semantic.
Everything multiplies in Vlado’s work—forests, trees, suitcases, lamps, hats, people. It is as if the objects surrounding contemporary man were his definition and his negation at the same time. Vladimir shows us a world where everything is an enigma, a story we recognize but whose plot escapes us.

Niels Reyes, myself, a decade younger than Vlado, share the same aptitude toward art and life. From my studio, also in Cuba, every day I try to show who we are, where we are going. The anguish and beauty of the human condition. Over the last decade my work has focused on portrait and faces. For me, there is no more powerful subject of study, representation, and experimentation than a face. Not only for its expressive force, but for its capacity to serve as a pretext for experimenting with new pictorial processes.
I seek to crystallize an emotion that cannot be described in words. Where the symbolic capacity is given by the layers of time and paint that construct my works. Everything is chaos and order.

It is difficult to find the right words that might serve as a guide through this exhibition that Zapata Gallery brings to you on this occasion. The simplest way is to say it is the work of two painters who live, work in, and from Havana. A vital and complex commitment in this chaotic world. But we hope it serves as testimony of a time, a unique space difficult to decipher.

Painting in Cuba today is an act of courage because it inevitably forces you to look directly at power and history. It is a cry for freedom where that freedom is denied to us.
It is a way of being—sublime and terrible at the same time—of which we and our work are but a modest example.

Stand by, in English, also means to be together.