+ about José Ney
Solo show: the permanent collection of the Southeast Museum of Photography. Daytona. Florida. EEUU. 2019.
Estilo y Técnicas
Style and works in collections
Dominique Fiat Gallery.
José Ney was influenced by the global artistic culture of the time .... (although belatedly a decade later, as a result of the internal / external blockade generated by the politics of his country in the context of the cold war) .... The decade 1970 was a period of consolidation and progress in the arts. Concept art emerged as an influential movement and was in part an evolution and response to minimalism.
Land Art brought works of art into the open air, moving away from creative production of commodities and seeking to engage with early ideas of environmentalism. Process art combined elements of conceptualism with other formal considerations, creating mysterious and experimental bodies of work. Expressive figurative painting began to regain importance for the first time since the decline of Abstract Expressionism twenty years earlier. Especially in Germany, where Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, Georg Baselitz became very influential figures all over the world ...
From the series Dialogues in Mutis
Willy Castellanos. Art historian / Curator / Photographer / Co-founder of Aluna Art Foundation.
(José Ney: small stories in the lower half of the world)
.... In the mid-1990s, the image of the social landscape in Cuba —the last refuge of the twentieth-century world utopia— was far from resembling the heroic record of the triumphant revolution. Traversed by political and moral contradictions after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and burdened by the material deficiencies of the so-called “Special Period in Times of Peace”, everyday life wove its own imaginary and new narratives of that chronotope of the post-Soviet period that summarized the coincidence of a unique time and space in the country. The photographers of those years —especially those who wandered camera in hand through the streets of the country— found in the register of paradoxes and in the everyday absurdity, the opportune keys to give “body and image” to a society detained in the threshold of their antagonisms. And they discovered in the allegory and other oblique approaches to the narratives of the status quo, a way to exercise a documentalism that allowed them to place new stories in an inside-outside of the compact block of the official imaginary. Faced with the archival epic of the sixties, these photographers imposed the iconoclastic power of metaphor as a way to shake off the obvious weight of history. The exercise of "digging" in the hidden palimpsests of the city and in its hallucinogenic layers, became an alternative way of positioning oneself, not only in front of the time of history and society —with its causes and its discourses—, but in a timeless relationship with the archetypal and in close complicity with the spaces of myth, simulacrum, camouflage and carnival, understood as liberating forms of the collective unconscious, capable of provoking a new cognitive experience.
José Ney Milá (Havana, 1959), is one of the most experienced creators of this creative drive, trend or chronotope of the “surreal” ....
From the series The Romantic Angels of the Earth.
José Ney on the subject of his book Notes for the End of a Century ...
I search in those experiences visuals, the reflection of the possible appreciations dreamlike or irrational, without losing the interpretation of their anthropological reality.
Also refer to * everything: the world and its inhabitants, its illusions, its sadness, its beliefs and love, without geographical references, nor specific religions or specific policies. Only the moment of hallucinations and convergences in our imaginary spaces.
* /… The whole is greater than the sum of its parts… (Aristotle in his writings on metaphysics (after or beyond physics). Holistics.
Galleria Ca’ d’Oro. New York.
Joaquin Badajoz: Escritor / editor / periodista / crítico de arte.
Texto sobre la exposición colectiva: Puntos Cardinales: cartografía de la memoria.
Cuatro artistas cubanos arremeten contra la representación de la realidad, resaltando el componente emocional, ilusorio, de la memoria.
....José Ney parece registrar un mundo exterior con sus fotografías experimentales, pero termina construyendo abstracciones, topografías combinatorias de su personal odisea espacial. Esa ruta aparentemente objetiva y desconectada de toda emoción, en la que los detalles se multiplican, agrestes, intimidantes a veces, no es otra cosa que un sofisticado paisaje interior. Ese que su ojo reconstruye a partir del deseo y la obsesión. Geografía apaisada, de un rojo gélido que es contradicción y desconstrucción en sí misma; paisajes helicoidales, caleidoscópicos, estrábicos; espacios inconclusos y mundos paralelos en los que un detalle oculto o duplicado subvierte todos los significantes. Parece querernos decir que la realidad que nos rodea tampoco es inmutable y comienza primero como construcción mental....
José Ney on his Migrations Series (Parallel Worlds).
...The Course:
How can you consider the context to which a real scenario belongs? If it is not space only, it is a space / time relationship. Where there are multiple scenarios interspersed from all directions "related" or antagonistic with their decorations of signs and structures that are transformed according to the timing scale of mobile, immobile and immovable motifs. And taking into account that all beings are irretrievably part and that according to their role in them, perception, vision and understanding can be very different (and not exclusively on their literal perspective).
These disagreements are recreated by a seat belt with which we capture "the realities" in our memory, auto predesigned through a labyrinth where illusory visions and dreams flow in parallel.
The context is as relative as the setting is ...
José Antonio Navarrete. Independent Historian / Museologist / Researcher / Curator.
Exploring the abstract ... Texts for the exhibition catalog ¨Adjacent abstractions¨
.... First of all, it must be taken into account that the photographer is interested here in recording the traces that others have left on the surfaces of sidewalks, streets and pavements. His work is affiliated with the indexed registry of visible marks that are, mainly, a result of previous human actions. The qualification of "unconscious collective creations" that he himself gives to these traces - the quotation marks are even his - indicates the basic, original relationship of his photograph with a direct, material referent. However, the elusive physical constitution of those referents; its ambiguous visibility, which operates within the limits of the perceptible, displaces these traces from the concrete (the solid, the compact) to the abstract ...
José Ney on his Casual Interventions Series.
The human being unconsciously acts on surfaces, canceling or overloading the visible to saturation, sometimes transforming them to the point of the imperceptible or the without sense.
The images from is Serie -like photographic maps- is a representation graphic of those "unconscious collective creations", on sidewalks, streets and pavements.
These visual contents are a fragment of the visible / invisible, the product of these anonymous actions and among other things, the result of what we call Chaos.
José Ney on his Puzzles Series.
The works titled Passport; Identity Mutations; Introspection and Anonymous, belong to the series Puzzles (Rompe Cabezas) where I intend to show the feelings of these people, their anguish and the psychological conflict, resulting from insecurity regarding the future of their lives and that of their loved ones.
The passport-type photographs that I use in the Puzzles Series (Rompe Cabezas) I have taken of emigrants who flee their countries because they are in great danger to their lives.
It is possible that most of them will be accepted as refugees indefinitely, others only temporarily and the most unfortunate will be deported to their countries of origin. They often tell me their stories, many of them totally heartbreaking.
I use different facial disorientation techniques, especially for children who experience these tragedies.
Introspection:
Photographs that form three-dimensional geometric figures. Inspired by the shape of the cube and that only part of it can be seen, because it is embedded in the plane of the floor or wall.
Each of the cubes by means of the reflections of the mirrors on their surfaces communicate us illusively with their interior, They represent the psychological situation of the emigrants during their legal process, it is certainly not possible to appreciate if it is sinking, stabilized or rising. That depends on the weight you carry inside you and the gravity of the space where you are.
Ángel Alonso. Artista plástico / editor de contenidos / crítico de arte.
EL CONFLICTO INCONSCIENTE: LA MÁS RECIENTE OBRA DE JOSÉ NEY
«Mi crisis interior consiste en que yo no soy capaz de identificarme a mí mismo con el yo de mi pasaporte (…) » Stefan Zweig
....La serie está formada por fotografías que originalmente fueron usadas en la confección de pasaportes y demás procesos legales de los inmigrantes, el artista reutiliza lo que en principio hizo con carácter utilitario para edificar un discurso visual. Son obras plásticas en las que la fotografía resulta el medio idóneo para canalizar la idea. Como en Una y tres sillas del viejo Joseph Kosuth aquí el uso de la fotografía no es hedonista sino conceptual....