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SUMMER 2016

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Mexico City’s Anonymous Gallery. “I associatedbasketball with city life and the fern to my life in thecountry,” says Figueroa, who also transformed hisfascination with air conditioners—a Puerto Rican’smost vital appliance—into sculptures which recentlywent on display at ltd los angeles. “Whenever I hadthe opportunity, I would scratch them and makedrawings on their back end. That was when I begandoing graffiti and I ran into quite a bit of trouble.”

That troublemaking has paid off: Italian curatorJacopo Crivelli Visconti recently invited Figueroa towork on one of Oscar Niemeyer’s buildings for the SãoPaulo Biennial. He’s also developing a record labelcalled Warevel Socio, planning collaborations withseveral Puerto Rican bands, working on a soloexhibition for Guatemala City’s Proyectos Ultravioleta,and curating an exhibit at Embajada of unseen workby the Puerto Rican artist Jesús “Bubu” Negrón.

Ariamna ContinoGrowing up the daughter of a San Alejandro Academyof Fine Arts professor and one of the founders of theExperimental Graphics Workshop of Havana surelyinfluenced the trajectory of Ariamna Contino’s artisticcareer. Whether it was flipping through the Matissemonographs her mother used in her classes oraccompanying her father in cutting and folding papersto make his engraving matrixes, the level of conceptual

and technical precision in her increasingly provocativerazor-cut works on paper has turned Contino into a hottopic beyond the chic Havana studio she shares withthree other rising Cuban talents (Frank Mujica, AdrianFernandez and her boyfriend and collaborator, AlexHernández Dueñas).

Her fretwork incorporates white paper orcardboard that is bent and folded to separate eachlayer, forming multidimensional portraits, still-life andabstractions with “ghost images.” “What really led meto the work on paper was its poetic and symbolicnature. Paper is a raw material, the basis—if one maysay so—of any representational process. It’sinstinctive and noble; you may tear it, fold it, draw onit and even assemble it,” says Contino. “Being bothfragile and sharp at the same time allows me to createa duality between delicate and dangerous. I aminterested in developing metaphors that I complementwith the possibilities given to me by the technique.”

Over the past two years, she and Dueñas havebeen teasing out the metaphors in statistical graphsand sociological maps sourced from the Internet andnewspapers that chart trends in global drug trafficking,unemployment and war, as well as the ethics/aesthetics divide. Her cut abstractions beneath hisminimalist graphs painted on glass are encapsulatedin a series of works called Aesthetic Militancy. “Wehave always defended this open work structure in

which we indulge in assuming risks together when webelieve we have a project that is worth it,” saysContino. Considering her work will be on view atHavana’s Wifredo Lam Center of Contemporary Art,the Ludwig Museum in Koblenz, Germany, Washington,D.C.’s Museum of the Americas, and Galería Habana(for a solo show) next year, it appears that those riskshave been justified.

Jhafis Quintero Two years after the U.S. invasion of Panama, JhafisQuintero broke out of jail where he had beensentenced to 60 months as a teenager for robbery.He fled to Costa Rica, robbed a bank with somefriends and was then sentenced to 10 years in prisonthere. “My life at that time was just pure inertia,making random decisions because I liked the highdoses of adrenaline,” says Quintero. In prison, he meta woman named Haru Wells who taught art as amethod for rehabilitation in the third year of hissentence. “I went into the workshop just to avoid therepetition and routine, but eventually I discovered thatboth crime and art were like twin sisters,” saysQuintero. “They had in common the same appetitefor transgression. This experience became mylaboratory. In such extreme circumstances the humanbeing has no choice but to be human in the mostradical way.”

Radamés “Juni” Figueroa’s Tropical Readymade, 2015

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After being paroled in 2005, he got a job andspent his nights and weekends turning hisincarceration into the powerful series ofphotographs, In Dubia Tempora, which featuredprison shanks set against ultra-white backdropsthat evoked fine jewelry catalogues and RobertMapplethorpe’s irises. The works were thenturned into a book, debuted at DiabloRosso andnow grace the library walls of Casco Viejo’sAmerican Trade Hotel. Quintero followed theseworks with a handbook of drawings that teachnew prisoners how to survive maximum securityfacilities (Máximas de seguridad, 2006), transfersof prison-style graffiti onto concrete panels(Cambalche), and his most recent series,Prosthesis, featuring plaster casts of handsholdings knives, strings to establish contact withneighboring inmates, and mirrors—thecellphones of prisons worldwide—that hung fromthe walls of Madrid’s Galería Sabrina Amrani lastyear. (Quintero staged a performancedemonstrating the communication system withthe public, whom he gave drawings to via stringsduring the 55th Venice Biennale.)

“In freedom, the basic instinct of any humanbeing is self-preservation. In prison, this instinctis second. Atop the list is communication,” saysQuintero, who is now based in Verona, Italy, buttravels back to Panama and contends it willalways be his spiritual (if not physical) home.“Wherever I am I feel Panamanian, but when I’mhome I am known as an artist who was acriminal. The justice system doesn’t forgive, soI’m afraid if I ever went back to live there I’d stillfeel that weight on my shoulders. In Europe, I amsimply known as an artist.”

ARLÉS DEL RIOKnown by locals as the “sofa of Havana,” theMalecón is a form of sculpture unlike any otherin Cuba. But during the past two HavanaBiennials, the iconic seawall has beendominated by the sculptural work of one artist:Arlés Del Rio.

For 2012’s Fly Away, he commented on thephysical and political limitations of socialism bycutting the silhouette of a jetliner into anominous chain link parcel overlooking the sea.Then, last year, for a piece titled Resaca, he

created an accidental beach—frequented bythousands of locals during the course of theBiennial—by unloading dump trucks full of sand(and a handful of thatched umbrellas and chaiselongues) onto the boardwalk where the city’sfamed sea baths once existed before the wallwas built.

“Every year, hundreds of meters of sandtransgress the Malecón through the undertow asif it wanted to reclaim the space lost on theHavana shoreline. The idea was to allude to thepast of the area and what the future might be,”says Del Rio, 40, a self-taught artist who learnedto make objects from his seamstress mother andthe sculptors and painters in the Vedadoapartment where he grew up (and still lives). Hisinstallation career first got off the ground in 1998after he filled broken trucks from the Cayo Cruzdump with massive flies made of trash during anunderground rave at a dilapidated sports center.“I was trying to get the spectator to reflect aboutthe importance of rescuing forsaken, unhealthyplaces.” That sentiment still seems to be at theheart of his practice.

Last fall at New York’s Robert Miller Gallery,Del Rio restaged The Need for Other Airs—whichdebuted during the last Biennial inside theCabaña fortress, where he attached 2,500multicolored snorkels to a vaulted ceiling insideone of the fortification’s ancient cells. He is alsopreparing two installations for a project in Berlinnext year, and working on a series of drawingsmade with hair collected from local barber shops,as well as a forthcoming collaboration in Brooklynwith José Parlá and JR. “As some friends told merecently, the street is the largest art gallery,”explains Del Rio. “I really identify with that. I don’tconsider myself entirely a materialist orconceptualist. I’m a little bit of everything.”

DONNA CONLONJONATHAN HARKER

When Donna Conlon’s husband was offered a jobin Panama City with the Smithsonian in 1994, theformer biology student uprooted her life in upstateNew York and started making sculpture in the citycenter. “I wanted to have some academic contextfor it, but at that time there were no graduateprograms here,” says Conlon, who traveled to

Baltimore from 2000 to 2002 to get her MFA atthe Maryland Institute College of Art. Uponreturning to Panama, which had regained controlof the Canal, she met the Ecuadorian-born artistJonathan Harker.

“People were really starting to do interestingthings,” says Conlon, who met Harker at a partyand hit it off. “We had pretty immediate mutualrespect for what each other was doing, and wewere looking at some of the same things thatwere happening at that time in Panama City.”Harker had originally moved to Panama in 1986to be closer to his father. Conlon had seen hisshort film El Plomero and he had seen her filmUrban Phantoms, so when she invited him to aglass recycling center on the outskirts of the city(a location for some of her earlier photos), the twoended up turning it into the subject of their firstcollaborative video, Dry Season, which featurestossed beer bottles crashing onto a mountain ofgreen glass. The piece had a certain poetic andpolemical quality to it and in the decade sincethat inaugural effort they’ve made many moreseminal works.

From 2010’s Domino Effect (featuring adomino setup made from bricks that traces thehistoric boundaries of Casco Viejo to talk aboutthe porousness of the walled city’s UNESCO WorldHeritage status) to 2015’s Under the Rug (a videoshowing junk being swept beneath a sod rug toaddress the nation’s collective memory loss),their pieces have appeared everywhere fromDiabloRosso to the Solomon R. GuggenheimMuseum. “At the center of each of these projectsare objects—antique paving bricks from the city’sold quarter, plastic bottle caps, coins that wereminted in an inflationary one-off by a corruptPanamanian president—that represent asituation that we find ironic or offensive orsomehow worth breaking open and delving into,”says Conlon. Adds Harker, “Most of our ideastend to emerge from improvisations and gamesbased on conversations about things that interestus in one way or another.” The two are now busyon a video about the beauty and chaos ofspontaneous urban flooding in the tropics, andanother that is intended to be, as Harker explains,“a dreamlike meta-narrative flux about existenceas a continuous gamble between life and death.”

“I discovered that both crime and art were like twin sisters.

They had in common the same appetite for transgression.”

—Jhafis Quintero

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PHOTO BY FRANCESCA MARCHI (QUINTERO); COURTESY OF ARLÉS DEL RIO STUDIO; DONNA CONLON AND JONATHAN HARKER

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Arlés Del Rio’s Fly Away, 2012

Jhafis Quintero A still from Donna Conlon and JonathanHarker’s Under the Rug, 2015

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