For Love and Other Demons of the Road: About the Exhibition Love Journey

Galería Máxima opened the year 2023 with its first group exhibition, Love Journey, on the occasion of a date with universal connotations such as 14 February.

The list of artists included Alberto Lago, Alejandra González, Aluan Argüeyes, Andrey Quintana, Daniela Águila, Douglas Pérez, Juan Suárez Blanco, Luis Enrique Camejo, Mabel Poblet and Niels Reyes.

It is love, the preconceived dynamics most hated and praised by people who profess it or swear never to have found it. Above all, it is a turbulent and timeless journey.  It is made up of the spare, the unusual and the commonplace, and is constructed between interpersonal relationships and polite idealism. It is this journey that the exhibition seeks to evoke.

It can be a journey between souls, as the artist Alejandra González suggests. Mar de fondo Ausencia, from 2018, is a work full of shadows and currents. It is to be understood in its uninterrupted flow through the liquid nature (incapable of domination or appropriation) that fills and guides it.

The artist proposes the natural course of things and the survival of memory in the dispossessed. The bodies are like leaves, moving aimlessly, but moving nonetheless. As described in the technical sheet: In the water lives life, in life dwells love.

The title Love Journey (2017) by the visual artist Alberto Lago – a work that in turn gives the exhibition its name – stands out. The large dimensions of the work make it impossible to overlook. But it is the colors that surprise with their visual prominence. It is full of joy, playfulness, color and life. It is the varied and atrophied reference to the sparkle of love as the years go by. It looks like an immense garden where you can sit down and get lost, a fantasy fortress of dreams and impossibilities. It fulfils its role as the centerpiece of the exhibition, becoming a vehicle for the other artistic activities in the space.

Sometimes Máxima becomes enormous and the works of art have to find their own ways of expressing themselves. Some manage to overcome these obstacles, while others remain stranded, like the work by Niels Reyes. The woman’s face is green in the pupils. Her seriousness is the proclamation of waiting, together with the hope of pulling the strings of time that will not return. It is the constancy of immovable permanence and also the youthful essence of a woman’s beauty, or of love. But of one thing we are sure, the work is solitary in its museographic positioning, perhaps it is an act conceived with these individual interests in mind.

Love… is conceived for the complicity of the night, as indicated by the neon lights and the intense colors. It is also the anthropological custom of Los caprichos de Kara (Aluan Argüelles, 2017-2022). Or it can be seen in the blurred silhouettes of embracing bodies (No.002 Arrivals, from the series Sad dimmons, 2022, Argüelles), or it is the night of a city (La Habana, 2022, Luis Enrique Camejo). But, without a doubt, it is an eternal and intrepid … journey towards life.

Máxima Estudio-Galería is located on calle Monserrate, entre Tejadillo y Empedrado, in Old Havana.