Smooth and Painful by Yaismel Alba Garib

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We are excited to announce the debut solo show of Cuban performance artist-cum-painter YAISMEL ALBA GARIB called smooth and painful at Fracas Gallery. When we started Fracas, we envisioned showing artists pushing their art practices to unfamiliar terrains. We look for artists using materials/media in wonderfully thoughtful, conceptually complex, and compositionally disruptive ways. With the current show, Garib weaves his experiences and training in performance art into his current painting practice. “Painting is performative,” he told our gallery director at their first studio visit with the artist. 

Garib’s preferred paint is egg tempera that he applies on Masonite panels. Masonite boards, as some of you know, continue to be used in the construction of theater sets. And the choice to use egg tempera paint seems anachronistic in the present day. Egg tempera paint is a classical medium, often associated with religious paintings of the early-Renaissance period (but also used earlier).

Missing in the equation for the artist are signs of brushes or brushwork on the panels. The artist uses an airbrush to apply paint onto the panel. The Masonite panels appear frosted in the lighter works and satin-surfaced in the darker pieces. The background in whatever saturated color the artist chooses allows the figures and the details enclosed to appear in motion—dancing like the figures in Matisse’s La Danse (1909) or like a fetus moving around in a womb captured by ultrasound. The past is brought forth to the present and the present bears upon the past.

The work in smooth and painful captures moments or instances. The panels are staged like actors in a performance space. We, as viewers, are also actors in the space and the audience. The panels bear upon our recollections of visions, icons, and actions—even if they cause us to think about the last panel we just viewed. The panels and their contents provoke its audience to experience what Bertolt Brecht called Verfremdungseffekt—an astonishment caused by unfamiliarity; a curiosity out of the uncanny; creation of feelings out of nothing at all. The show is a performance in which all in the space participate.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

YAISMEL ALBA GARIB (b. 1990, Matanzas, Cuba) completed his MFA in Performance from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He also earned a BFA in Theater Studies from the University of Arts in Cuba. The following are select exhibitions and performances: Loving Cuba(Performance) and Is my body strong enough to hold a rebar? (Performance), Nonation Tangential Unspace Art Lab, Chicago. Critical Control Point (Performance), Miami. The act of destruction is an act of salvation (video installation), Miami-Havana.

We often feel that the world is complete, as we can transit all its parts. Sometimes we tend to stay in certain safe areas. But we might consider the spaces as units that disappear every time we cross into other more unknown spaces. Yaismel Alba Garib’s artwork questions the possibilities of experiencing simultaneously something and nothing—constantly experiencing and not experiencing both. What feels familiar might also feel empty. Or what we take from the world, we might give back to it. For Garib, the work symbolizes a temporal-spatial moment, one that is in constant transition—a work in progress. The artwork is a metaphor for circumnavigations of the artist’s body around the identities that he claims. Seen in his artwork are shapes and other details that want to merge to become figures or bodies, but they never do.

The contradictory process is the only constant. The performance of becoming whole is always a work in progress.