National Museum of Contemporary Cuban Ceramics Opens Solo Exhibition by Lázaro Navarrete

The National Museum of Contemporary Cuban Ceramics inaugurated the solo exhibition Oh, Sacrum! by artist Lázaro Navarrete on Thursday, November 14, in the Historic Center of Havana, which is currently celebrating the 505th anniversary of the capital city.

Curated by MsC. Surisday Reyes Martínez, the exhibition will be available until May of next year at Mercaderes Street No. 27, corner of Amargura, under the Office of the Historian of the City of Havana.

“The exclamatory expression contained in the title of the exhibition serves as a necessary initial stimulus to mobilize thought and inquire into the very origin of words,” states a passage from the catalog.

“The starting point for this terminological adjustment was the phrase from Latin os sacrum, which translates to ‘sacred bone,’ strong and located at the base of the lumbar vertebrae.”

It continues: “This is what supports everything, although nothing is ultimately unbreakable. The use of the interjection is not casual; it contributes to indicating admiration, surprise, exaltation, sadness, joy, concern, disbelief, and many other sensations and feelings that permeate the artist’s work presented here.”

From this bony structure as an articulating axis arises, metaphorically, the dichotomy between ephemeral and enduring, flexible and strong, light and hard, appearance and essence, imperfection and perfection. In this force of opposites and their plural coexistence lie these proposals that have another marked condition: they resize the meaning of “the sacred” on various levels of transcendence from a very personal perspective.

Through the pieces, it is argued that it is the imprint left by humanity in what it creates and transforms, as well as what one thinks in their most intrinsic truth. It is also present in the path constructed through any of its channels—its private, social, and collective life history—as well as in its environment for physical and spiritual growth.

There is also an “intellectual” play between the imprint of the object in its real and everyday essence, its artistic representation, and the identification conferred upon it. Navarrete does not dismiss any material or medium to conceive these volumes, each intervened with admirable skill. Some are constructed with more enduring elements due to their very nature while others emphasize a sense of fragility and temporality without being entirely ephemeral.

Source: Promotion from the National Museum of Contemporary Cuban Ceramics.

Translated by Luis E. Amador Dominguez