Carlos Garaicoa highlights tensions between culture and nature with 'La Sección áurea'

La Sección áurea, a new solo exhibition by Carlos Garaicoa at Galleria Continua's Paris gallery in the Marais, highlights the Cuban artist's recent work, featuring a new series of paintings and sculptural installations that explore his ongoing fascination with architecture, mathematics and geometry. On view from January 24 - March 19, 2025, the art exhibition also includes preparatory drawings that further illuminate these themes. Marking a return to colour as a central element, La Sección áurea (The Golden Section) allows Garaicoa to reconnect with his painterly roots while revisiting the key influences that have shaped his career, including European avant-garde movements, Russian constructivism, the Bauhaus, abstraction, Cuban and Latin American concretism and the literary imagination of Jorge Luis Borges.

Garaicoa has created a dialogue between art and urban space, using architecture to investigate the social structure of our cities. With a multidisciplinary approach, he explores cultural and political issues—particularly Cuban ones—through the lenses of architecture, urbanism and history. The city of Havana has been his primary focus. Through sculptures, drawings, videos and photographs that often carry themes of irony and hopelessness, Garaicoa critiques modernist utopian architecture and the collapse of 20th-century ideologies. His installations, which incorporate a wide range of materials, delve into the city as a symbolic space, challenging conventional views of urban life.

As the gallery shares, "At the heart of the exhibition lies the series π=3.1416, a collection of relief paintings created using carpentry, painting and mixed techniques reminiscent of assemblage. These works explore cities and formal inventions that verge on abstraction and sculptural artefacts. Overflowing with colour and geometric concepts, this series represents an additional layer of meaning in Garaicoa's artistic trajectory, bridging formal concerns rooted in the history of 20th-century art with a forward-looking perspective on contemporary painting and sculpture."

The series' reliefs, as curator Osbel Suárez describes, can be considered as "works in transit", establishing a musical overture for La Sección áurea: "The very nature of the reliefs—halfway between two-dimensionality and the third dimension—blurs the boundaries between the pictorial and the sculptural, placing us in an ambiguous, hard-to-define territory. Just like overtures, they set the tone and atmosphere for the themes that are approaching, for what is to come, indispensable for inspiring anticipation and creating expectations."

A central piece of the show is the installation Toda utopía pasa por la barriga II (Every Utopia Passes Through the Belly II), a project Garaicoa has been developing for over 15 years. This work reflects on the idea of utopian, idealised cities, drawing influence from the metaphysical and conceptual architecture imagined by past architects. The installation features a large collection of glass jars, each containing wooden models of imaginary buildings, stones and food ingredients.

The jars, acting as sealed capsules, prevent interaction with the outside world, symbolising themes of isolation and marginalisation, particularly within sprawling urban centres. Their transparency reveals the contents, with the food items serving as metaphors for the ecological and food crises exacerbated by society’s growing demands. These crises, marked by environmental degradation, medical challenges and nutritional insecurity, inspire Toda utopía pasa por la barriga II—a vision of dystopian cities that bear witness to the displacements and disruptions of our time.

These works by Garaicoa, who currently lives and works between Havana and Madrid, invite viewers to reconsider the garden—not only as a natural phenomenon but also as a human construct—and to reflect on the tree as a powerful metaphor for the fragility of existence, the resilience of nature and the vulnerability of urban life. In this context, the sculptural installation Entre espinas, made from acacia thorns, acacia, oak, linden and balsa wood, alongside metal elements, directly addresses the growing threat of architectural development overpowering the natural world.

"Together, these artworks trace paths that highlight the tensions between culture and nature, the organic and the constructed, the rigidity of precise forms and the freedom of natural growth. Developed through reflections on previous creations and experiences, the exhibition features artworks that find their place within a rich interplay of contrasts and perspectives. Beyond these meditative reflections, the exhibition critically engages with the concept of beauty that has shaped Western thought, while addressing sociopolitical challenges and ethical questions that continue to influence the trajectory of contemporary society," relays Galleria Continua.