Reynier Leyva Novo shows at Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino with a show titled 'Solid Void'
This is the artist’s first solo at the gallery and features an
installation of five hundred plaster casts of the empty interiors of vessels and a coordinating wall installation comprised of fifty embossed prints made from metal casts of the plaster sculptures
Dates and Venue:
1 September – 3 November 2022
Sicardi Ayers Bacino gallery, Houston, Texas
One of Cuba’s leading conceptual artists, Novo combines anthropological research with cutting-edge technology to examine the psychological and sociological effects of complex issues throughout history, challenge ideology and symbols of power, and question notions of an individual’s ability to affect change. The show is accompanied by a text written by art historian and curator Gerardo Mosquera.
Installation view of Reynier Leyva Novo: Solid Void at Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino, 2022.
Photo courtesy Tom Dubrock.
Installation view of Reynier Leyva Novo: Solid Void at Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino, 2022.
Photo courtesy Tom Dubrock.
As Mosquera writes, Solid Void is “a clear, silent, ordered, contemplative representation of the void that inaugurates the artist’s
Changing Memories series… Novo cast the containers’ voids to represent them, to make present their very specific absences. But by so doing, as the show’s title indicates, he not only transformed the void into its opposite, a solid object, but also underlined its ontological entity by taking its imprint in a double, emphatic representation that acts as a sort of proof of the void’s existence. Similarly to Duchamp, Novo is enthralled by the inversion that can give the void a body, while denying it by the very act of making it solid. In this aporia the evidence of the void’s existence becomes its negation. Unlike Duchamp, he is a formalist – as orthodox conceptual artists usually are – who follows a minimalist aesthetic based on repetition, cleanliness, and geometry, no matter the subjects he tackles or the artistic means he uses.”
Installation view of Reynier Leyva Novo: Solid Void at Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino, 2022.
Photo courtesy Tom Dubrock.
Similarly to Duchamp, Novo is enthralled by the inversion that can give the void a body, while denying it by the very act of making it solid. In this aporia the evidence of the void’s existence becomes its negation.
Installation view of Reynier Leyva Novo: Solid Void at Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino, 2022.
Photo courtesy Tom Dubrock.
