Reynier Leyva Novo

AESTHETIC ACTIVISM
Gerardo Mosquera

Form is emptiness, emptiness is form
Emptiness is not separate from form, form is not separate from emptiness
Whatever is form is emptiness, whatever is emptiness is form.

Solid Void, Reynier Leyva Novo’s first solo exhibition in the U.S., could be seen as an illustration of a well-known passage of the sutra The Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom, a most popular writing of Mahayana Buddhism. This branch of Buddhism ultimately considers that everything is empty, and in the Suñña Sutra, Buddha himself is famously quoted explaining that the world is empty. The idea of the void is crucial not only for Jainism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and other philosophical religions, but also in Western philosophy and mysticism. It is also a very important notion for science and has captivated numerous artists and writers around the world. Marcel Duchamp – not unlike Novo – took a plaster mold of a human vulva and casted it in metal for his sculpture Female Fig Leaf. He was fascinated by how through this process inside can become outside, front become back, concave become convex, solid become void, and vice versa, an inversion that relates to the above notion. Rich in suggestions and symbolic meanings, such operation is at the core of this show. In Solid Void, Novo presents two mirroring installations. One consists of five hundred plaster casts of the empty interiors of multiple containers conceived for diverse uses and for holding different liquids. These containers of varying designs range from teacups to bowls and test tubes, and were created by several cultures. Fifty of these pieces were then cast in metal and pressed on cotton paper to create the embossed prints that are displayed on the second installation on the wall. The show is thus a clear, silent, ordered, contemplative representation of the void that inaugurates the artist’s Changing Memories series.

The void and the related idea of subtraction have been crucial to Novo’s work. He “debugged” Soviet grandiose propaganda representations by subtracting the texts and images away from political posters, which were thus reduced to background color planes to make them look like geometric abstract art. As part of the same work, he also exactly reproduced fragments of two huge communist monuments on real scale, which became simply aesthetic forms emptied of the monuments’ original meanings – the work was appropriately titled Revolution is an Abstraction (2016- 2020). In A Happy Day (2016-2020), Novo removed from photographs the images of Mao Zedong and Fidel Castro, leaving empty spaces where the dictators’ images used to be. In Nothing About Nothing (2018), he painted over and over in white the empty wall where his works that were censored in an exhibition and later in a biennial should have been displayed.

Eastern philosophical religions consider emptiness as a mode of perception, a way of looking at experience. As we can see in the above examples, Novo followed this concept in a worldly, radical way by using the void as a tool for political statements, to deconstruct ideological rhetoric, and even to sarcastically contest censorship. In Cuba he is considered a dissident, as much for his public position and actions as for his artwork. It is in this framework that we can understand why Novo stated that this exhibition was his most political work. However, if the previously mentioned pieces implied a critical agency for which the void was its weapon, using it as a means for liberation, Solid Void seems to proclaim a nihilistic worldview. Is the whole world an empty abstraction?