Among the various topics that his artistic work deals with, Omar Sanz Cárdenas (Havana, 1991), chooses this one for our section, a kind of visual exploration, but also philosophical, about the inside and the outside, staying and venturing towards where the world is supposed to be. The eye, accommodated to the gloom that welcomes it, glimpses the incessant flashes of light, a sea of harsh transparencies that must be traversed by paddling, because, as María Zambrano said, the island of Cuba, more than in the sea, is perched in the light.
From the security of the home, the artist goes to the incitement of the unknown, a space where the impulse of desire cannot be clamped. And that risky collision with the spaces that question becomes enjoyment, an exercise of will, in various permutations, in a work fixed on paper or in the digital universe.
Omar is a portrait and abstract photographer. He is so passionate about scrutinizing the psychological profile of the character, as cutting and composing through the viewfinder those urban fragments that in his macro visualization cease to be part of something to transmute into something in itself and for itself. The portrait narrates. The abstract work attempts to detach itself from any analogy, from any literality. His searches within abstractionism have been seen in the exhibitions “Saldos”, (UNEAC gallery, Holguín, 2016), “Lenguaje de mudos” (Chile, 2017), “Dones del buffón” (Centro Hispanoamericano de Cultura, 2017) , among other.
The collection of portraits “Fix the instant” was exhibited in 2014 at the Municipal Gallery of Centro Habana. Basically, it focused on personalities of Cuban culture who agreed to undergo the lens, from Cirenaica Moreira to Ponjuán, from Alicia Alonso to Graziella Pogolotti, from Fina García-Marruz to Fernando Pérez, from Leonardo Padura to Monsignor Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, for only mention a few notable ones.
About the series that he shares with us today, the artist says:
“Walking through the city I found this first staircase, very similar to the one in my grandmother’s building where my father took me every Friday afternoon.
“The ‘Escaleras’ series, in addition to combining aesthetic and conceptual elements, therefore has a more personal reason.
Untitled, Havana, 2022. From the series “Stairs”.
“Those days of my childhood in Centro Habana were, for me, the very meaning of freedom. Discover, through the camera, the charms of the city that he was beginning to discover, in that yellow hour.
“With the contrast of light between the space from where I take the photo and what is right in front of me, I want to achieve a parable: contrast the feeling of being in one’s own point and the need to leave, with the uncertainty that this entails in the rare certainty of freedom, which can be translated into seeing the street as the place of light in the image, since the staircase is a construction designed to communicate several spaces that have been separated.
“Inspired by the work of the Japanese photographer Sugimoto, I begin, then, to look for analogies between both contexts, starting from certain spaces.”
