Alain Pino Artist Statement

 

My work is a reflection of social and political events that happen around me daily. I make use of the social and cultural patterns I am familiar with –I extract visuals from the news, the street, historic materials and other sources and mix them in search of the new meanings that come out of their interaction.

My work is a reflection of social and political events that happen around me daily. I make use of the social and cultural patterns I am familiar with –I extract visuals from the news, the street, historic materials and other sources and mix them in search of the new meanings that come out of their interaction.

Portraits are a big portion of my work. I realize them in photography, painting and installation. They are full of contradictions. I not only create androgynous characters, but place them in paradoxical situations that I create by having them dialogue with certain objects. Formally my pieces are hybrid. I take advantage of the formal resources that different materials and genre offer.

Escape (2002-present) is an ongoing reflection on the theme of migrating. In it I explore aesthetics, poses and actions that imply some sort of escape, without it being literal. 

In the series El Tiempo Pasa (2006) (Time Goes By) I photograph women, to whom I have attached a shaving foam beards. Instead of depicting specific subjects, these portraits talk about the pass of time and the projections of future that are in play at every moment.

Zona de selección (AÑO) (Selection Zone) is a 26-feet-long installation where acrylic panels and aluminum pipes undulate as waves, crossing each other every certain distance thus mimicking the trajectory of the DNA. Photographs of different people with their mouth open, as if taking a breath of air, are printed on the plexiglass and are metal tubes pass through the mouths of those being portrayed. In this case, I wanted to reflect on the migration through the sea and on the process of “natural selection” that is implied within surviving this experience.

Alain Pino offers a very fresh look of his reality –the Cuba of the end of the nineties and the beginnings of the new century. When other artists choose to narrate what is going on around them, Pine focuses on the individual. The characters of his photographs are shady, strange –often androgynous and in situations or poses that are undefined and mysterious, as species that went through a metamorphosis and have evolved in order to deal with their new environment. By focusing on people instead of events, he calls attention to the social change that is taking place in the islan

.(Yuneikys Villalonga, marzo del 2006)