Jose Manuel Fors, one of the foremost conceptual artists living and working in Cuba today, returns to Couturier Gallery after an absence of 11 years, with an exhibition of new works titled Wide Shadow. For this exhibit, Fors will intervene the gallery space with small photographic fragments. The cut photos extend over the walls in patterns some of which may simulate a whirlwind of images. Fors’ interest in this “mapping” of fragments comes from his ongoing interest and investigation of memory and its relationship with accumulations. The exhibition will continue through February 13th.
Each of the photos Fors used were cut leaving barely visible a place or person(s) captured by the lens, others reveal faces, fragments of landscape; these details, however, do not allow us to know with certainty the origin of the images. That is precisely what is important for Fors, the fragment of the moment, not its totality. Every photographic fragment has its own past regardless that the artist has selected only one part, as if trying to reduce its story to a small portion of memory. One cannot overlook that every photo is linked to the other through almost imperceptible threads that become links between individual and collective memory, the small and the big story.
Wide Shadow becomes a new evocation of memory, where each of the installations intermingle and the gallery space appears to contain one single work. The cut photographs overlap and cumulatively become one large abstraction. The inquisitive viewer, however, can discover the fragility of the new stories that are made up of old photos.
Jose Fors (b. Havana, 1956) will be the first to tell you he is not a photographer though most of his work is photo-based or incorporates his photographs. These photos are, however, simply a medium incorporating images of objects and these photos become objects themselves collaged into a larger whole. "The image becomes an archaeological site…The image gains value in relation to the function all these objects once had" he explains. For this exhibition, Fors will also include umbrellas stripped of their fabric leaving only the metal ribs, covered with found objects incorporating the old and new: old camera lenses, watch parts, gears, scissors, picture hangers, flash drives. The bare, arched ribs act metaphorically as the bridge connecting us to the fragments of the past adorning them in elegant and sturdy fashion.
Jose Fors, who figured prominently in the seminal exhibition of Cuban photography, “Shifting Tides,” at Los Angeles County Museum (2001), has exhibited extensively in Cuba, the United States, Venezuela, Costa Rica, India, Spain, France, Belgium, Canada, Mexico, Nicaragua, Russia, Japan and Italy. Public collections holding his work include: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Latin American Art (MoLAA), Long Beach, CA; Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Houston, TX; Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, Fort Lauderdale, FL; University of Virginia Art Museum, Charlottesville, VA; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, La Habana, Cuba; Fundación Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas, Venezuela; Casa de Las Américas, La Habana, Cuba; Fototeca de Cuba, La Habana, Cuba; Fototeca de Pachuca, Pachuca, México; Hotel Super Club, Varadero, Cuba; Museo Las Américas, Managua, Nicaragua.
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