FLAVIO GARCIANDÍA

10 years (2009 - 2019) is the third exhibition of the work by the outstanding Cuban-Mexican artist Flavio Garciandía to be hosted at Mai 36. Flavio Garciandía was born in Caibarién, Cuba in 1954 and ranks as one of the leading and most influential Cuban artists of the past four decades. His influence stems from a wide-ranging oeuvre that includes painting, drawing and installations. As hombre del trópico, he articulates from a critical point of view the hierarchical relationships of the modern canon and he has shaped generations of artists both within Cuba and beyond.
For more than three decades, Garciandía has been crafting a form of visual communication that ranges from the most intimate of whispers to blatantly witty and outlandish mockery, by deploying the tools of abstraction as the supreme modern paradigm of western painting. Accordingly, the work of Garciandía is teeming with subtle visual and textual references to culture, by distorting, dissembling and altering its figurative remnants. For him, Appropriation Art is more than just a creative method; it is a sophisticated system that reveals just how he regards the construction of knowledge, aesthetic syntax and art appreciation generally as a processual juxtaposition of layers, like a palimpsest. This is one way of interpreting his creative approach to the language of images and signs.
The exhibition, featuring more than twenty works on the first and second floors of the gallery, offers a unique opportunity to admire the creative developments of a decade and, with that, the transition to a thoroughly mature, liberated and quite phenomenal oeuvre. As the artist noted recently on a visit to his studio in Mexico City: “After more than four decades of painting, this may well be definitely my most personal work.”