When we evoke the history of mankind, we remember millenary civilizations such as the Egyptian, Chinese, Mesoamerican and others that overwhelm us by the talent of its citizens, who often inspired by the omnipresence of a supreme God, built gigantic monuments that today are silent witnesses of the splendor achieved by these peoples. There is no doubt that what we are today and the development achieved by mankind is largely due to the priceless legacy of those cultures that built the most amazing works ever known.
However, as history revealed itself, innumerable expressions of culture were revealed, such as in the high Middle Ages, an original architectural design was developed, in which its grandiloquent and monumental structures were very appealing to the church… and in order to be closer to Heaven – therefore, closer to God – the higher the towers of its gothic churches were to be.
Inspired by the graceful structures of medieval gothic architecture, the young artist Yanela Ruano takes advantage of the images of those ancient constructions to evoke an architectural phenomenon of «creole modernity» that has nothing to do with the high towers of the aforementioned European style; especially when it comes to the monotonous buildings of today’s (Cuban) urban centers, where time passes in the stupor of boredom as we contemplate the infinite repetition of the same buildings in each block, on each street, on each sidewalk, in each district… Nevertheless, Yanela, with the reference of these blocks, inserted the gothic landscape into her paintings, breathing into her work a novel originality, in whose pretext these aligned blocks reveal in the conceptual an original expression of her medieval urban landscapes.
«Autumn Landscape» may seem a recreation of the Gothic, as a recurrence of an allegory towards European culture, but in the creative mind of our young artist, these images serve as a support for a different discourse where a criticism is made of the creation of a housing system, which although was essential to solve the housing precariousness of the moment, in which these same long perpetuated structures have sadden the landscape of the city.
«Autumn Landscape» as a critical allegory of Yanela Ruano, besides the expression of an art made with passion and technical mastery, reflects the artist’s concerns about representing the aspects that mark our lives in terms of the perception of our living environment, as well as the value of an architecture, with its elevated steeples, that draw us towards the appreciation of some of the most precious constructions created in the Universal History of Art.
Raul Ruiz Miyares
Caribbean House. February 3, 2005