Landscape 2004
The artist captures the beauty and poetry of a sleeping sea, a sea we would never wish to awaken again.
Description
Erik Garcia Gómez is an indefatigable inventor. When everything seems lost, Erik appears as a “dream fixer,” offering solutions as if problems were not part of daily life. He makes us believe that everything can go back to being normal.
The sequence of images in Landscape is part of the horizon of his native Cojímar. This coastal zone of Havana is an emblematic symbol for the “disappeared.” It is a boarding point from which many people left Cuba, a point of departure and indefinite return, transfer-point for lives and deaths. It is a solemn monument to troubled rafters blinded by fury and hope.
Landscape is a work that seals a pact and settles scores with the past. Our gaze is lost on the horizon and we submerge ourselves in a painful retrospection, traveling to a past that always forms part of the present, a past that survives in the heart of every Cuban family. Our thinking bears witness and binds together different memories.
Erik proposes the hopeful Landscape of his daily surroundings as if everything had returned to normalcy. Erik heals our wounds and gives us a peaceful sea, the same one that once was witness to so many fears, so many estrangements, rushed departures, and deaths. Erik captures the beauty and poetry of a sleeping sea, a sea we would never wish to awaken again. – Magda Ileana González-Mora, Curator