Untitled. From the series Degradación (Degradation), 2022. Outside painting of the city on wood.
Diana Fonseca
Extraña Verdad
Diana Fonseca (Havana, 1978) is a Cuban artist interested in dismantling the simple things of life and everyday events. Perhaps for that reason, or because of the lyrical propensity of her work, she catches varied images of reality and interconnects them in narratives that talk about disparity and inconsistencies, contemporary life, visual saturation, emptiness, and banality.
El Capital, 2015. Intervention in the three volumes The Capital, by Karl Marx.
El Capital (detail), 2015. Intervention in the three volumes The Capital, by Karl Marx.
From the series Degradación (Degradation), 2022. Outside painting of the city on wood
Diana Fonseca´s Degradations are works conformed by scraps of paint layers from different Havana facades. Such random old paints overlapped generates an abstract visuality that rescues, from an autonomous artwork, the city’s history and the intimate history of the individuals that inhabit that city. The title itself points to the series idea: Degradación (Degradation), degradation in a temporal and physical sense —deterioration, fading, forgetting— and also, logically, in a symbolic dimension.
Untitled, 2017. Men's and women's handkerchiefs.
It is remarkable that Diana approaches creation with no prejudices against the irrelevant. She is not afraid of the sentimentality of common emotions, usually hidden on account of the fear of displaying bad taste. Life reappears in her projects together with that net of commonplaces around us: to be born, to grow, to love, to die. It is the beauty of the everyday and ephemeral that, ultimately, constitutes the essence of existence.
Puente (Bridge), 2015. Installation.
Puente (Bridge) (detail), 2015. Installation.
For Diana, the opposite concepts, antonyms, must have a point in common at the philosophical and experiential level for something to happen. Otherwise, she thinks, nothing happens. That is how life events work dialectically —oppositions are, in fact, what generate the harmony of existence.
3D, 2012. Artist book.
Piedra preciosa (Gemstone), 2015. Ordinary stone with the classic contours of a cut diamond.
La belleza es otra forma de verdad (Beauty is Another Form of Truth), 2019. Tiles and textile.
“DIANA FACES ART FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF A FILM EDITOR”
Caminando bajo el sol (Walking Under the Sun), 2007. Lambda photo imprint.
Videoart is understood by her as a way of telling a story, a story that sometimes ends abruptly. Diana prefers her videos have a handcrafted appearance, without overusing the technology. Thus, she tries to disrupt perception and the times when our experience makes us believe we can predict the course of an event. Through this transformation of the ordinary, Diana manipulates our mechanisms of perception.
Storyboards from homonym videos (Monument to Deadness / The Night Is Nothing Without Wich Fills It), 2016. Acrylic and graphite on paper.
Monument to Deadness, 2016. Video (still).
The night doesn´t exist without that which fills it, 2016. Video (still).
General view of the exhibition Viaje a la semilla (Journey Back to the Source), 2018.
Partial view of the exhibition Extraña verdad (Strange Truth), 2016.
Graduated from the Higher Institute of Art (ISA) in 2005, Diana Fonseca is one of the most interesting contemporary Cuban artists. She has performed numerous personal exhibitions both inside and outside the island. Among her most interesting solo projects we can find Cara a cara, a two-person project with Jacques Villeglé in the Brownstone Foundation, Paris, France; Diana Fonseca, presented at the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York, USA; Viaje a la semilla, two-person show developed with Aimée García at Factoria Habana, and Extraña verdad, at El Apartamento, both in Havana, Cuba. Her work has been included in collective exhibitions of relevance such as Landlord Colors: On Art, Economy, and Materiality, Cranbrook Art Museum of Michigan, USA; Illness has a Colour, a side exhibition to the XIII Havana Biennial that took place at Estudio 50; The Cuban Matrix (Torrence Art Museum, LA, USA), Wild Noise (Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, USA), Fireflies in the Night (Stravos Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center, Athens, Greece), and Transhumance, Beyond Cuban Horizons (CAB Art Center, Brussels, Belgium). She has also participated in important fairs: ArtBo, The Armory Show, Untitled Art Fair, ARCO Madrid, Expo Chicago, and LISTE Art Fair Basel.
In 2015 she was awarded the EFG Bank & ArtNexus Acquisition Prize, Bogota, Colombia. She has also received the Cast Research Residency, Melbourne, Australia (2016) and the JustMad Residency, Asturias, Spain (2017).
Her work takes part in the following institutional collections: Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, USA; Museum of Contemporary Art of North Carolina, North Carolina, USA; Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, USA; Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, USA; CAB Art Center, Brussels, Belgium; Perez Art Museum (PAAM), Miami, USA; EFG Bank & ArtNexus, Bogota, Colombia; Margulies Collection, Miami, USA; Kadist Foundation, San Francisco, USA; Fundación Calosa, Mexico City, Mexico; Foundation Jean Boghosian, Brussels, Belgium; Colección Coppel, Mexico City, Mexico; Brownstone Foundation, Paris, France.