Alonso Art in Miami Shows Cuban Artists Esson & Iraola

Monday, 20 November 2006 18:28

Miami, FL - Alonso Art is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition of two photography projects: MEMORIA TELEVISIVA by Jose Iraola and THE EMPIRE STATE BUILDING VERSUS THE WATER TANK, by Tomás Esson.  On exhibition December 2 - December 30, 2006.

Jose Iraola (Cuba, 1961) and Tomás Esson (Cuba, 1963) are best known as painters.  They were trained mainly as painters and exhibited largely as such throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s.  However, in recent years they started using photography on a regular basis.  Jose Iraola’s two most recent shows, “Fotofija”(2004) and “Facts and Fiction”(2005), were dedicated solely to photography.  Tomás Esson is exhibiting photography for the first time in his career.  He dedicated seven full years of his life, day in and day out, to the photography project that is the subject of this exhibition.

Jose Iraola resists being called a photographer although his adulation of the pictorial aspects of another media is obvious.  What distinguishes his new, visually seductive images from his earlier work is a shift of emphasis from “making a picture” into capturing the perfect composition in a single frame.  In his Portraits featured in “MEMORIA TELEVISIVA”, as in the previous works of his “Fiction” series, Iraola’s images are potent usurpations of a television show’s violence mongering and sensationalism.  His images are non-accusatory, anti-heroic statements that go beyond stereotypes to redress the politics of personal growth and social struggle in the dominant Latin-American discourse.