Aimee Garcia The Queen of Concealment
AIMÉE GARCÍA, THE QUEEN OF THE “CONCEALMENT SYNDROME ”
By Elvia Rosa Castro
Aimée García belongs to a generation that sprouted on the Cuban artistic scene in a transitive period that was moving from the beliefs in great utopias to a loss in faith or disenchantment. It was known, methodologically, as “the generation of the 90s”.
It was an introspective period where the sliding toward new utopical beliefs leaned mainly in two formal resources: pastiche and self-portrait. The first one permitted to outline social commentaries through images made legitimate by History of Art, while the second one placed the individual beyond collectivity and warranted the artist as the author of a work where at some moments the authorship was lost due to inter-textual winks. It was about a new type of humanism where the artist was situated as a protagonist and center of racial, generic, domestic, historic, social and identity contradictions. Aimée did not escape from this strategic or linguistic alibi, especially in the case of self-representation, because in this artist quotation is diluted, not tacit.
The case of this artist is an enigmatic one for in her work we face retinal images that maintain a great restlessness that seems auto referential, autobiographic. Her dissatisfaction carries her to represent herself scraped-headed surrounded by dangerous or repulsive animals. She appeals to blood in works that going beyond bi-dimensionality, go on to the function of embroidering as an allegory of the domestic obstinacy and on to the use of a mask as a need to simulate or as an illusion to chameleon politics in a gruff and sterile context.
She has always preferred painting; that seems to be her territory, but she does not doubt in carrying out great-embroidered metal installations. In a former period, she prioritized photography, but she always comes back to pictorial genre with a mysterious tension between tameness and cruelty, hedonism and perversion, fragility and robust spirit.
The garden of intolerance is her last solo show. In it, Aimée projects herself in flowers and disappears within so many representation objects. Different red flowers occupy the first plane and almost the whole composition. Violence and all ideological allusions brought about by the red color struggle with beauty and their apparent nobility. Aimée García, no doubt, always appeals to a visual resource as a pure pretext. She is the queen of the “concealment syndrome”.