“Doubt everything”
Descartes

What is photography: the sign of one referent or the referent of another sign? Is photography still synonymous for truth today? Is there any current historical process that underlies the changes that have occurred in contemporary photography? The exhibition “All in,” by Reinaldo Cid at the La Nave gallery of Proyecto Génesis, between December 2022 and January 2023, is an intelligent photographic essay that explores these questions.

I

The exhibition's title, "All in," comes from a casino phrase meaning to bet everything on a single possibility. Rey bets everything on four small-format pieces, in black and white and gelatin silver — "Axioms," "Elixir," "All in," "Sentence" — all from 2022, which discuss issues such as uncertainty, irresolvable coding, chance, or the last bastion of certainty.

“Axioms” is a series of photographs, mounted on 4x5 and 5x7 plate holders or chassis, which is where the negatives are placed, in which images of various security systems (safes deposits, doors, etc.) appear, which require an unknown code and unknowable to the viewer. The image, quite simply, becomes an enigma. This is clearly an anti-poetic maneuver because poetry, in reverse, usually translates the enigma into an image. Being organic with his concept, Rey does not start from the act of photographing real objects but from images that are on the internet, he translates them analogically, prints them and displays them on supports and materials typical of analog procedures, such as the chassis and clamps, the trays and the table, the water and the emulsion. In this way, he plays with the belief that analog photography is more truthful and reliable than digital. One piece in particular is iconic: on a film camera, the blade, like a moving guillotine, is frozen in a single instant, revealing only the word "TRUST" in the photograph. A sense mutilated, not by the finger that presses the shutter, nor by the eye that frames the shot, but by the mind that discriminates.

It is true that the art of photography constitutes a constant editing process, but there is no reason to make lying a profession, nor to turn the photographic apparatus into a guillotine camera.

Following the two series that make up the inaugural piece comes a second piece composed of a single photograph: “Elixir,” which depicts a bank vault. If “Axioms” points to an irreducible foundation: the undecipherable code, “Elixir” points to an intoxicating emblem of power: money. The unknown leads to the unknowable: the limit of knowledge glimpses its horizon in the knowledge of the limit. All this, with small images. For great photography is that which, regardless of format, says much through silence. Insignificant appearance, transcendental essence. This small-format, black-and-white photograph is significant because it remains silent amidst the chromatic clamor and because it renounces impressing with size in order to impact with intelligence. In this sense, the bank's vault is reminiscent of something I didn't know, which Cid explains to me: an anechoic chamber, a space enclosed from noise, where silence is created. Be that as it may, we are in the presence of an oceanic mind, as Yogananda would say, in which the whales of inspiration barely leave a trace…

Having constructed the codes in the first two pieces, Cid then sets about deconstructing them in the last two.

“All in” consists of a 1950s table, on which multicolored tubs of water have been placed, in which analog photographs of bingo boards with some numbered chips have been submerged. Chance is subjected to law, play to nature. At the same time, the artist's intervention—a kind of creator created—reaches a point where it disappears and the piece becomes autonomous. All in, nothing out. Contemplating this piece, the viewer wonders what would happen if the artist had combined this synchronic approach with a diachronic one? I mean, if instead of submerging all the photos on the same day, he had done so at different intervals, so that we could see in each tank a different phase of the process of decomposition of elusive chance by inexorable law. But a conversation with Cid is enough to realize that it's not necessary: although all the experiments started from a zero point, then, over time, they have evolved in non-identical ways: the same seed has yielded different fruits, as in the parable of the sower, and that goes with the spirit of the exhibition.

The final piece, “Sentence,” is a negative attached to a clip, bearing two coordinates: 1/125 and f 11—the shutter speed and aperture, respectively, used in this photograph. This technical data is the only certainty amidst so much uncertainty. Truth in contemporary photographic art is reduced to this: a label explaining how the light was manipulated. Everything else appears shadowed, obscure, doubtful. Is it, as Lezama said and Rey repeats, that “to define is to reduce to ashes”?

In summary, we are faced with a perfectly balanced sample, divided into two moments, each of which begins with a series that culminates in a single final piece of compact meaning.

II

Cid's exhibition is an analysis of contemporary photography that transcends mere opinion or a purely hedonistic attitude. It is a photographic essay on the current meaning of photography, one that prompts reflection. A dissection of it could be structured on three levels.

• 1) Diagnosis: contrary to its origin, photography has become more of a reference than a sign.
• 2) Probable cause: in the contemporary world, a process of knowledge prevails that privileges the senses and communication (communicative empiricism) to the detriment of practice and reason (practical rationalism).
• 3) Predictable consequence: photography metamorphoses into nycography.

The natural process by which a photograph—which is originally the sign of a referent—becomes a referent itself when the represented thing disappears, has been violated. Photography is not a referent or a sign: it is both sign and referent. The problem is that the photograph, not the thing itself, is becoming the starting point, the axiom of reality, and not necessarily with good intentions. In this way, the real object is replaced by a copy, human experience is altered to manipulate it, to make us believe what is not. What is valid as an artistic resource is entirely questionable as a manipulative gesture. 2 By some sleight of hand, and much to Eco's chagrin, the name has turned… pink.

The above could be related to an epistemological process characterized by the progressive replacement of practical rationalism with communicative empiricism; that is, a process in which the senses and communication have supplanted practice and reason as factors of knowledge. We don't start from something we see, reason, or manipulate; we are led to take as our starting point something whispered in our ear. Everything is dictated to us. Communicative empiricism, typical of the media, is expressed in the manipulation of photography as a point of reference. The motto today is not "Create" but "Believe," not "Think what you do and do what you think" but "Listen to what I tell you and repeat what you hear." The planet is one big church. Beneath this epistemological process lies another of a much deeper historical nature, derived from the unprecedented rise of communication since the beginning of the 20th century, but that is not relevant here.

The fact is that, in the conditions of today’s world, with technology comes the guillotine. Technical precision goes hand in hand with semantic imprecision. The contours of the photographed object are becoming ever sharper, more colorful, more precise, while its understanding becomes more confusing, more elusive, less trustworthy. It is the paradox of a society in which “everything solid melts into air.” Today, the outer light clouds, dulls, darkens the inner light. Truth has become a lie. Photography seems to transform into what we call nyctography: from the Greek, nykta, night, darkness, and graphos, writing.

So, what is the habitat of truth in a world where infobesity seeks to replace objective reality? Must we renounce the truth of the facts? Does the vector of technological development necessarily imply lying, or is it just a biased view of development attempting to become the only option? Could it be that today the only thing certain is falsehood, or is that what they want us to believe?

III

In short, Cid reveals manipulation by manipulating us, a gesture that, dialectically, is an invitation to critical viewing. He encrypts by deciphering and deciphers by encrypting. He builds a wall of lies with bricks of truth while shouting the truth while whispering subtle lies. Like one paraphrasing the famous sentence of the Cretan ³ Epimenides, the artist warns us: “all photographers lie.” And here lies the paradox: if the phrase is true, then it is false because Cid is a photographer and he is telling the truth; if the phrase is false, then it is true because he is a photographer and he is telling a lie.

What do you think?

Cerro, 19.II.2023
Noel Alejandro Nápoles González

How fascinated Marguerite Yourcenar would have been to discover that all the effort condensed in Opus Nigrum has not been confined to the pages of this book. And this is reasonable, since the vocation of a transgressive alchemist is undermined by the rediscovery and reinterpretation of one of its founding elements.

Blood has been associated with a wide variety of processes and meanings in continental European thought and Western culture. Blood is not only inscribed in the life-generating processes, but also in the processes of decomposition that death brings about. Blood denounces the loss of virginity in women. Blood is used as a sacrificial offering in some Indigenous and Afro-Cuban cultures. Wine is metaphorically represented as blood in Catholic ritual, and the chalice that holds the wine is a symbol of the blood of Christ. Blood as a delicacy that Nosferatu relentlessly pursues in his quest to perpetuate his "life" in death. The irony of life. Blood as identity, as a code that registers belonging to one group or another. Blood as density in suicide, as a surge that colors the anguish of ceasing to be. Blood on the hands of murderers, even when the blood is not visible on their hands. Blood as an ingredient in the feast of the guards, who with blood preserve foreseeable futures. Blood that in its torrent floods the torture chambers. Blood that seals a pact of friendship or that is spilled for unspeakable causes. Duels to first blood. Blood that flows in childbirth as one who, only with blood, can account for this maieutic act. Or simply, the blood that cures Cemí's asthma once he "urinates orange, almost bloody water, where it seemed as if scales floated."

Blood, again and again, but never the blood associated with the mysteries of developing, with the chemistry that brings forth the ghostly images inhabiting photographic paper. Perhaps Reinaldo Cid is a kind of Greek sorcerer and alchemist, a worshipper of primordial deities. No one knows if, in these wanderings, he cultivates for himself the moly flower that, with the blood of the giant Piccolo, helped Odysseus defeat Circe. We cannot be sure if his photographic seclusion is nothing more than a pretext for descending into Hades and returning to the light, carrying with him so many bells silenced by immobility and apathy.

Sensing the unease that pervades the world with the digital image, a world of the possible, Reinaldo returns, in a stubborn act of deference, to primordial procedures, not to reproduce them, not to ennoble himself like the feline that stalks us in the throes of tenderness, but to rethink them. Herein lies one of the conceptual and formal acuteness of the works I present today. And this acuteness arises from that dialogue with a photographic tradition once it subverts the discursiveness and causality that, in the words of José Lezama Lima, “becomes monotonous and impoverished.”

The well-worn argument surrounding the “post-photographic” brought about by the digital image has—paradoxically—revived genres that had suffered from a certain temporary silence. This is one of the reasons why thinking about photography becomes, whether through force or outcry, an exercise that seeks to uncover a hidden structure behind the visible. The works I present today operate an unusual symbolic violence within the “apparent” immobility of their objects. The works gathered here represent not only a visceral exploration, a primal exploration, but also a somatic violence.

Pheromones is a series that explores ideology as a phenomenon intrinsic to the individual, insofar as its forms manifest a transfiguration within the subject. Pheromones begins with a photographic census of all the bells currently rung on the island. The record makes no distinction between their locations or the principles they adhere to; the photographs simply show the bells as they appear in their places. A work in progress, the series proposes a kind of inversion in terms of procedure.

After the negatives are developed and printed, the images undergo an experimental process that produces a "substantial" change. Instead of the traditional photographic toning, where metallic oxides are replaced by others using industrially manufactured chemicals (such as silver oxide in the paper emulsion using a bleaching agent), the print is immersed in human blood for approximately 24 hours. After this period, the print is removed and subjected to several washing and drying cycles. The result is the reappearance of a new image, this time through the absorption of iron from the blood.

But it's not just any blood being used here; it's blood that, for reasons not always disclosed (AIDS, cancer, violent deaths, tuberculosis), is discarded as useless. The ritualistic nature of this procedure connects with ancestral wisdom, since blood creates blood, resulting in an alarming image that, from the stillness of the bell, serves as a stark warning about violence as a social phenomenon.

Estela is also a ritual, a kind of exorcism that has accompanied a process of visual and conceptual maturation in this emerging artist. Exploring the transfigurative states of the human, whether through relationships with certain power structures or through cultural discourses on life and death, Estela “closes” the Möbius strip that is, ultimately, life. Using the glass from precarious Cuban coffins as his medium, Reinaldo recycles these panes, imbued with a code as individual in its decomposition as individuality itself. The traces of blood that converge on them generate a kind of pattern that, metaphorically, transubstantiates into the identity of a subject who has ceased to be. The symbolic interplay of life and death is established in the work through the very manipulation of the medium in the “traditional” terms of photography. Moving on a tremendously cryptic plane, Reinaldo Cid regurgitates his fascination with unconventional procedures in the realm of art. And it is precisely this capacity that makes him investigate those border zones where the symbolic emerges in what Lezama called the obsession that never destroys things, but rather, searching in the manifest, the hidden, in the secret, that which rises so that the light may configure it.

Magazine C of Cuba ART MAGAZINE No.27 2019. Pages 178 - 183

Lo que ves no es sino el reflejo del contenido de tu espíritu.
Bardo Thos Tol

La muerte es una cuestión vital. Sobre su fondo oscuro, incluso la más pálida evidencia de vida parece un arcoíris. Sin embargo, no hay humanidad sin culto a la muerte. ¿Por qué nos subyuga un asunto que en verdad nos sobrecoge? Tal vez porque nada atrae más que el misterio. La muerte no se conoce: es ella la que nos conoce y revela en realidad quiénes somos. Dama nocturna, fría y silenciosa: ¿cómo puedo deletrear tu nombre, si tú eres el punto final en la oración de la vida? ¿Qué gramática terrible, qué sintaxis gobiernan tu escritura? ¿Y cómo puedo dar con ellas yo, que apenas soy un chispazo entre dos oscuridades y que no tengo más que esta certeza, breve y fugaz, flanqueada por dos dudas infinitas y eternas?

Hace unas semanas, visité con mi esposa la exposición fotográfica Memoria sumergida, de Reinaldo Cid, en la galería Seis Seis, no muy lejos de la Loma del Ángel, en La Habana Vieja. Allí me topé con dos series, en blanco y negro, que me impactaron: Pendientes y Noche especular. Allí comprendí que el que quiere busca medios, el que sabe los encuentra y el que puede los usa para sus fines. Por eso querer es saber y saber es poder.

No puede haber desdicha que no tenga remedio. No puede haber poder funesto que no se pueda vencer. Si hay voluntad, crea los medios de actuar.
La novela del bosquecillo de lotos.

La serie Pendientes está compuesta por una docena de fotografías de anillas de ataúdes. Las imágenes son sobrias; el título, irónico. Y la sobriedad y la ironía suelen tributar a un prólogo inteligente. Poco feliz hubiera sido nombrarlas Aldabas: ello habría reforzado innecesariamente el tono fúnebre y empastado la imagen. Ya se sabe que, para muchos, sonar las aldabas de las losas es parte de la liturgia cuando visitan a sus muertos.

En español, la palabra pendiente tiene varios significados: que pende, que está por resolverse aún, que está atento, arete, plano inclinado. La obra de arte, como decía Octavio Paz, es una máquina de significar. El fondo luctuoso y el acabado basto de las anillas, sin embargo, son suficientes para sugerirnos que puede tratarse de los aretes de esa Dama nocturna, fría y silenciosa, que adorna con argollas de ataúdes sus lúgubres orejas. Lo importante es saber que la belleza no está sólo en el equilibrio y la armonía del objeto que se mira: está también en el ojo cultivado que lo admira.

Cuenta la tradición taoísta que, cierta vez, Sakyamuni (el Buda histórico), Confucio y Lao Tsé se sentaron alrededor de una jarra de vinagre, para catar su contenido. Buda lo halló amargo, Confucio agrio y sólo Lao Tsé lo encontró dulce.

Aquél que mira hacia fuera, sueña; aquél que mita hacia dentro, despierta
Karl Jung

Un tríptico espectacular por su hechura y por su significado es la otra serie, Noche especular. En ella el artista hace una impresión por contacto de cristales de los ataúdes, después de la exhumación de los cadáveres. Las huellas que han dejado dos años de descomposición quedan traducidas, técnica fotográfica mediante, en tres cielos nocturnos, más o menos estrellados, en uno de los cuales incluso se adivina la silueta de un cerebro.

En una primera aproximación, siento que la técnica está por encima de la poesía y que el proceso supera el resultado final. Pero mirando a fondo me percato de que la sencillez del resultado final es sólo aparente y que lo macabro del procedimiento se suaviza con la carga poética. No es posible contemplar estas fotos sin abismarse en el misterio insondable de la unánime noche ¹. Manipulando las huellas materiales de la muerte, Rey crea una metáfora de la sublimación de la materia, cierra un ciclo y trasciende el lugar común: somos polvo de estrellas que retorna a su matriz estelar.

Con mano de escultor y ojo de fotógrafo, Rey obra el milagro de convertir una experiencia tan cruda como la muerte, en metáforas cuyo ADN son la técnica y la poesía, trenzadas como la poesía del mecanismo y la técnica de la imagen, respectivamente.

El poder penetrante del ojo Hace ver las cosas Pero el ojo no puede verse a sí mismo
Sharapa

No obstante, el bojeo de Rey a la muerte es anterior a estas dos series. Este joven artista -que se inició en la fotografía influenciado por su madre, quien custodiaba el archivo de imágenes del diario Invasor, en Ciego de Ávila- trabajó, entre 2010 y 2012, en una serie de cinco fotografías, titulada 180 0 de Nada. En ella intentó agarrar la última imagen visual de un condenado a muerte por fusilamiento.

Aquí nada es de gratis. Cada imagen es circular (aunque no barre 360 0 sino la mitad) y está orlada de negro, cual símbolo de una visión que se apaga. La tierra, los muros, el cielo, todo lo concreto se arquea y se desvanece en una mirada que pronto rimará con nada. Uno se imagina el cuerpo atravesado por las balas, que se derrama pero no se resigna a morir, mientras el alma pugna por irse a bolina. La soledad es la única compañía en ese instante. Y es tal, que uno llega a sentir el frío, el silencio, la asfixia final, el vacío que, poco a poco, nos conquista.

He aquí una obra que se aleja de la épica de los primeros años de la Revolución y penetra en el drama existencial del individuo, pero es igual de rigurosa y significativa.

En verdad, en todo esto, no hay un átomo de realidad
Phowa

En Occidente se conoce el Libro de los Muertos del Antiguo Egipto, que recoge las oraciones que acompañaban a los difuntos a la otra vida, pero se ignora su homólogo tibetano. Su nombre es el Bardo thos tol. Bardo significa entre dos, es decir, entre la muerte y el nuevo nacimiento, y Bardo thos tol quiere decir aquello cuya audición nos libra del Bardo. Se trata de un libro conformado por varios tratados cuyo fin es propiciar la reencarnación de los muertos. Según la creencia tibetana, la facultad consciente (namshes) de una persona, al morir, penetra en el Bardo. El Bardo no es un sitio sino un sueño: es el sueño del namshes, la sumatoria de sus recuerdos, de su subjetividad, de la cual sólo se sale al renacer.

La paradoja sin embargo es la siguiente: ¿cómo un seguidor de Buda, que propone un camino hacia la liberación de las sucesivas reencarnaciones, va a ser partidario del Bardo? Sucede que, de acuerdo con la creencia, sólo un Buda es capaz de abandonar el Samsara (rueda de las sucesivas muertes y renacimientos) y de entrar al Nirvana. El hombre común, por el contrario, renace constantemente y aspira, al menos, a hacerlo en un ser más feliz. Los tibetanos no creen en fatalismos pues suelen decir que el que sabe está cómodo incluso en el infierno. El Bardo thos tol, precisamente, contiene los medios para reencarnar en un escalón superior de la existencia. Si el Buda es la liberación definitiva; el Bardo, por lo menos, es un mejoramiento.

Pero ya que el Bardo no es más que un sueño, el Bardo thos tol termina diciendo que todas las imágenes que en él contemplamos son meras ilusiones:

Eres tú quien, por las propensiones que están en ti, vas a pronunciar tu juicio y asignarte tal o cual renacimiento.
Ningún Dios terrible te impulsará a ello.
Irás por ti mismo.
Las formas de los seres pavorosos que ves apoderarse de ti y empujarte hacia tu nuevo nacimiento son aquellas con las cuales revistes las fuerzas de las tendencias que están en ti.

Sabe aún:
Fuera de tus alucinaciones no existe ni Señor juez de los muertos, ni dioses, ni demonios, ni vencedor de la Muerte.
Entiéndelo y logra la liberación. ²

Berkeley estaría feliz con este epílogo, y tal vez repetiría con placer su aforismo favorito: Esse est percipi, ser significa ser percibido. Yo, por mi parte, confío en que algún día aparecerá otro Champollion, y la muerte dejará de ser un jeroglífico. Mientras tanto, sean bienvenidas las metáforas de Reinaldo Cid, que resemantizan los signos tradicionales de la muerte y convierten la guadaña en instrumento musical, lo afinan y le sacan las mejores notas. Así, como en el Bardo thos tol, la muerte no es un punto final sino apenas tres puntos suspensivos…

Cerro, marzo de 2017
Publicado en Revista de Artes visuales Artecubano No.2 2017 pág 80 - 83

¹ El epíteto es de Borges.
² Citado por Alexandra David-Neel en Textos tibetanos inéditos, Editorial Kier S. A., Buenos Aires, 1987, pp. 166-167

Reinaldo Cid is a young photographer who is producing a powerful iconography, drawing strength from historical memory, while experimenting with alternative processes and various forms of symbolic construction.

In Cid's work—still interested in photographic materials, traditional supports, and chemical processes—the terms "staging" have not managed to displace the notion of experimentation. It is from his experimental vocation that this artist engages with the documentary tradition. In his work, the document is not reduced to the iconographic representation of an event, but rather is produced as an exhibition of evidence, an exploration of the trace, and an investigation of the index.

Specular Night is part of that line of work in which the graphic sign is produced by immediate contact with the represented object, whose referent is a decomposing body. The identity of what is photographed also dissolves. In fact, it doesn't seem as if anything has been "photographed." And yet, the glass panes of the coffins look like old photographic plates. The print is the trace of the process, not its result. And what is important is the meaning, not the object. It is in this semiological zone that Cid works, transforming the stains on the glass into night landscapes.

"Pendants" is a series of photographs based on more conventional processes, where the production of meaning involves a linguistic game that doubles the meaning of the visual sign: the rings placed on the tomb lids, magnified by the photographic image, resemble earrings or pendants to adorn women's ears, but they retain the other meaning of "pending," that which is yet to happen, what is to come. Like many of Reinaldo Cid's works, this series alludes to death in an oblique way, pausing to reflect on time and its paradoxes. Death—one of the original themes of art—is treated by Cid as a propitious reference point for developing a philosophy of photography, as a sublimation of the image and of collective memory.

Juan Antonio Molina,
enero 2017

Full text: http://www.paginaenblando.com/campos-de-batalla-sobre-la-fotograf

Like a 21st-century traveling artist, Reinaldo has arrived at each of these historically significant sites with a precise objective: to record with his camera lens the impassive existence of a singular artifact, one whose existence everyone assumes, but which very few have the opportunity to see. For the bell marks its territory and announces its presence through the expansion of a signal in space, as if it were an acoustic pheromone.

Several of the bells documented by Reinaldo are centuries old. They have witnessed time, traversing history from their static positions. From atop towers, they have provided the soundtrack to the growth of cities and the slow transformation of society, reaching us today as almost ghostly presences, as residual forms of communication. Therefore, these bells are sediments of culture. They are the image of time, symbols that mobilize the entire human history of the land over which their expansive sound has reigned.

A spectral whisper runs through this series. Reinaldo has managed to express time condensed in the materiality of bells and architectural spaces. He has managed to embody in photographic image another dimension of reality. The dimension where the incorporeal exists, the imaginary traces of what has happened, the absences that accumulate, the spirits that settle, the energy that moves us. He has managed to breathe life into the unspeakable, that which can only surface when the fold of the poetic is unfolded.

The process produces visual effects beyond the artist's control, giving each photograph a unique appearance. As a result, each image, nourished by the blood, achieves an unrepeatable contrast and coloration. Where there was once explicit reference, there may now be diffuse visual information. Where the atmosphere was once realistic, it is now invaded by strange configurations and ghostly stains.

Hamlet Fernández
Profesor y crítico de arte.

Reinaldo Cid is a meticulous and experimental artist like few others. His pieces, installations, and photographs are the result of intense meditation, but also, and essentially, of a dizzying labor. In his works, we witness the process as the embodiment of the imagination, as the natural source of a concept subsequently transformed into art. With these characteristics, it is not surprising, but rather logical, that his symbolic production—despite his youth—rightfully and powerfully fits into the country's artistic overview.

He knows exactly where to find the foundation of an image, the core of a concept; hence the expressiveness of his works, their intense symbolic mark. Thus, idea and production combine to yield the expected result. The artist conceives the image with mastery of his craft, leads his imagination, and subjects it to the process of refinement, to the maturation of the procedure.

Combining bells (the historical symbol) with blood (the material that makes each piece unique) in a photographic essay and titling it "Pheromones" (the symbol of communication) is proof of what I'm saying. These are "bells laden with blood," bells as receptacles of ideology, a concept arrived at through the artist's experimentation. Cid opts for a ritual in which the proposed visual regime speaks to us of centuries of national history, and to reach this point, processing the signs, combining them, and making them merge has been the chosen strategy. The result is a rigorous investigation, belonging simultaneously to the realms of historiography and iconicity. Constructing meanings, deconstructing them, inventing his own representation of signs—this is what the artist proposes; and he succeeds.

Rafael Acosta de Arriba,
La Habana, marzo de 2015.

After receiving the Creation Grant awarded by the Center for the Development of Visual Arts in Havana in December 2010, and the invitation to participate in the Third Biennial of the End of the World in Ushuaia (Argentina) shortly thereafter, many dawns found the young artist Reinaldo Cid on the shores of Havana Bay, engaged in extracting the hydrocarbon residue that accumulates there daily, mixed with other waste from the city. This dark and pestilent amalgam constitutes the fundamental raw material of his project Capital; An installation in which these waste materials take center stage, molded according to the configuration common to gold ingots stored in bank vaults, but arranged, in this case, on wooden pallets, like any other circulating commodity.

Interested in the notions of “real capital” and “symbolic capital,” Cid underscores, and simultaneously destabilizes, the idea of ​​value associated with both precious “black gold” and the art object. The installation reminds us that both can be treated as commodities and that their value, determined by “competent” institutions in different circuits, is ultimately expressed in monetary terms, even though it is difficult to understand how the art market establishes parity between the artistic and financial value of a work; an operation that, as we know, does not conform to usual marketing norms.

By dealing with the world of waste, and in particular with polluting petroleum waste, Capital also acquires ecological connotations. In this sense, it not only highlights the conflict of water pollution in a specific geographical location, but also sheds light on the subjugation of geological time to the overwhelming temporality of capital, which has disastrous effects on the environment.

The Center for the Development of Visual Arts has dedicated itself to the arduous, yet exciting, task of discovering what is being produced in our time. Reaching out to young creators is an almost infallible way to stay connected with current artistic production. In this sense, the creation grants called Estudio 21 are designed to broaden and deepen support for young artists. In the 2010 edition, Reinaldo Cid was awarded the grant for his project entitled Capital.

I became familiar with Cid's work before he received the grant, during one of the visits that the Center's specialists make to the University of the Arts (ISA). He was in his second year and was beginning his work with hydrocarbon waste, which, after a complex process, he would transform into "ingots."

At that time, the idea was still in its infancy.

In 2009, as a result of research by the Institute, the young specialist from the Center, Daymí Coll, curated an exhibition called Take 9 with first-year students, which included a piece by Echemendía. For this occasion, she selected the work Virus, a direct carving in chocolate measuring 51 x 40 x 40 cm that represented the molecular structure of HIV. It was undoubtedly one of the most captivating pieces in the exhibition. The attraction, a giant, unidentified "chocolate" of unknown shape, served as a pretext to draw in spectators, who could either savor this exquisite treat without being aware of the danger it represented, or, conversely, see it as a way to "attack" the virus by being "devoured"—two interpretations that depended on the public's prior knowledge.

In 2009, Cid returned to participate in an exhibition at the Center, this time as a student in the workshop taught by artist and professor Luis Gómez at the ISA (Higher Institute of Art). On this occasion, he used beeswax to create Portrait of an Orphaned Teenager, an installation still in progress, in which he imprints various images onto sheets of beeswax that are then placed inside beehives. The image is constructed from the spaces left after removing the cells from the sheets.

The following year, Cid submitted the project entitled Capital to the aforementioned Estudio 21 creation grants and won one of the awards. Capital is the fruit of his obsession with constructing his own oil ingots, for which he used the hydrocarbon mixture that had settled on the shores of Havana Bay, causing a high degree of pollution throughout that coastal area. It was a high-risk undertaking for the artist, who for months had to process this contaminated material until reaching the final stage that allowed him to obtain the necessary hydrocarbon composition to make the ingots. The idea, although not entirely original, highlights the intention of creating “capital” obtained from a waste product that at one time represented an economic boom, with all the dangers that entails. It alludes to the value that the artistic object acquires in itself due to the very nature of the material that composes it, oil, equivalent to gold in the current era and a generator of great wealth, but also of the most bitter conflicts; it proposes a dialogue concerning the value attributed to the work, which ultimately does not respond to the codes of art but is imposed by the society that gives rise to it. This year, 2012, the award-winning project has definitively become a reality, and it has also served as the culmination of Cid's university studies.

The process I have intentionally described exemplifies the very purpose of the Center for the Development of Visual Arts, as a space for experimentation, for risk, vulnerable to change without intending to establish paradigms or legitimize, but rather obligated to stimulate and follow the trajectory of talented young people, as Reinaldo Cid has demonstrated.