1.

The whispers of representation can be heard through The Language of Forms and the Forms of Language (2). Pieces of impeccable workmanship demonstrate the debt owed to the referents who took care of the materials with which the artistic object was created, and from there traced the evolution of a movement that represents the gains of seventy years of abstraction. In the evolution that went beyond the limits of forms to express topicality, analytical thought, and ascetic cleanliness, the clarity with which later artists honored their predecessors can be felt. Never has an idea been so dangerous as when it is taken as alienating or frivolous. The organic forging of a taste for abstraction among the acknowledged pioneers of Cuban modernism set a standard that lives on to this day. Generations of artists have been able to update the excessive neatness of the forms that once defined Cuban concretes. Symbol and cadence unveil those political references that, hidden under the cloak of the formal, passed unnoticed by the eyes of the censor.

2.

As long as The Prophet's Dream (3) lasts, the flame of poetry will be kept alive. Dilettante interventions, daughters of a failed utopia, are part of this section, which diagrams the presence of a group of artists who have manifested with their work the possession of a social-political conscience and a commitment to their time. Different promotions of creators formed after the Cuban Revolution have had in common the concern for expressing the cadence and lyricism of a context that appeared stable and cheered the citizen welfare with the benefits of a unique form of government. The doctrines that promulgated national values and a revolutionary sense of belonging were replaced by other fictitious realities, other imagined concepts, and the longing for a possible dream. Utopia receded as it approached the horizon, anointed by the ambiguous intertwining of "homeland and political system", until it finally evaporated. The prophets grew old and the siren songs that sweetened the ear of the new man were extinguished in the jaws of predestination to be what cannot or should not be... Sooner or later, the rhetoric of homogeneity dimensioned the meanings of all the secondary characters that inhabited the incoherent story of history. The art created by the writers who give this section its body continues to be a tool to expose the nonsense of a doctrine that is torn to pieces before the eloquent version of the others.

3.

The Great Journey: Archives (4) has also been a great consequence. This is how the artists in this section represent the trauma of the void; the absence of the mass without return crossing the Florida Straits on any sunny day. The land has been orphaned for tomorrow because no one has stayed to document the tragedy. The memory of national exile and the experience of personal exile are two truths that cross transversally the framework that is Cuban migration. Memory, safeguarding, and connection are the premises of the creation that consoles the sparrow of the homeland far away. The departure, the escape that the Cuban nation has experienced for sixty years, is captured by the voices of artists who, both inside and outside the geographical limits, have transferred their daily life to connectivity in order to recover the contact that can be cured from abandonment through critical exercise. Exile returns to beat in these works as a reflection on loss and the search for identity in distant lands. The territory, with its symbolic charge of belonging and loss, becomes a conceptual canvas where the artists explore the complexities of the relationship with the homeland. In this sense, the exhibition becomes a space of encounter between different perceptions of the Cuban territory, from nostalgia to the redefinition of what is one's own identity.

4.

Sensory Landscapes of Memory and Desire still exist. They open a oneiric slope towards the game of representation. This section stands as a capricious voice that mixes folklore and surreal dynamics in stories anchored in childhood nostalgia, life in Cuba, and travel as a reinvention of the unconscious. The emotional undertow intertwines with the most intimate longings to activate the playful component of the work. With a few exceptions, the visual landscape is the protagonist of a world plagued by bucolic scenes and personal insomnia. Human presence is almost never present. It is as if, in this eagerness to sweeten desires, the accumulation of truncated aspirations had forgotten forever the tropical idyll that destiny had in store for Cuba. Benevolence, astonishment, and the desire for freedom remain a rebuking force. The watchtower resists the silence in the midst of a rural landscape, forgotten, but crying out to protect the forms of its time.

5.

Sisyphus was aware that he was dragging his condemnation towards the stream, he looked down from the top of the peak through which he thought to free himself from its weight and discovered that those waters in which he was trying to wipe away his punishment already belonged to another imprisoned reflection. Without slowing his effort, he could hear the whispering of The Reflections of Narcissus. Self-referentiality and self-representation are ways in which artistic discourse materializes the use of the self, the body itself, or the remnants of its existence to create discourses that question reality. This has been the case in Cuba, especially at times when artists have felt the need to use themselves to delve into the effect that human relations have on their environment. Since the eighties, self-contemplation and the conversion of the carnal reservoir into a catalyst for the creative process allowed some of these creators to conceive other voices to express their nonconformity with the country's reality. The Cuban eighties was the beginning of a trend that pondered the self as a tool that deconstructed a vision of the world constrained to the materiality of the work when the moment demanded the sharp constancy on what was badly done. Thus, before his own reflection, Narcissus sometimes opened the mirror to escape and other times invited Sisyphus to continue dragging his stone, dreaming of possible freedom. With an exegetic audacity to speak from the body, the artists featured in this section have made use of wit, humor, and sharp irony to position themselves as demiurges in their own territory.

6.

Fascinated by The Spirit of the Real, the Reality of the Spirit, we come to the encounter with the divine. Fascinated by The Spirit of the Real, the reality of the spirit, we approach the encounter with the sacred. The cultural roots of an island that blends Congo and Carabali with Catholic religious tradition have resulted in a polyphonic atmosphere of beliefs, myths, and practices anchored in the consciousness of the spirit. It is precisely from a spiritual dimension that the artists who preside over this section have conceptualized their worldviews of the real world and their dreamed universes. Works that emanate a plurality of complex references to Afro-Cuban religion; esoteric and spiritual practices; root traditions passed down from generation to generation, such as Palo Monte, or explicit representations of the Sikán Myth within the Abakuá Secret Society. Among other more emphatic references in religious imagery and cosmology in various extensions and meanings. All are directed to engage in dialogue around the human being as the common axis that sustains them. Dreams, premonitions, or evocations that warn how to face the immediate future, are transmuted into containers of wisdom to narrate, through allegories and symbols, the images that describe the Decalogue of an ancestral world in the factual and chaotic life of the Cuban being. The sensations we experience in this section connect the visuality of the works with the spiritual essence of Cuban culture and subtly but powerfully reveal the relationships between the earthly and the transcendent, and the irreversible fusion of matter and the soul.