Dear friends of the Alliance Française, dear guests, I wish you a warm welcome to Yanela Ruano’s exhibition entitled Gothic Times.
Before writing these introductory words, I wanted to get an exact idea of what the word Gothic means: it is an aesthetic style that spread from the XII to the XVI century in Europe. It is situated between the Romanesque style and the Renaissance style.
A definition of Gothic can be found on page 617 of the Robert Micro Dictionary, but it did not teach me much truth, the truth was located somewhere else, and then I wondered, why look in a Dictionary for a definition when all the walls of the Alliance Française from the first to the second floor murmur as if I were in the halls of a Church. What is Gothic? Let us all trust the artist Yanela Ruano to take us in this journey through time and let us go with our imaginations, so I am going to propose a very personal definition of the expression Gothic Times:
Gothic times: noun and qualifying adjective of plural masculine gender; it is said of the experience had while walking in the labyrinthine of paintings by Yanela Ruano, experiences where geographical notions of interior and exterior and historical notions of European cathedrals and high-tech cities are mixed; where modernism is a prisoner of its rigidity-as its rows of buildings try to escape through the oval arches above, where it seems that God or the viewer is watching. Gothic Times: neologism; by viewing the paintings of Yanela Ruano one discovers the inner strength to touch the infinite; to take it, grab it and fence it in. Enabling the viewer to say: I am stronger, bigger and freer… we all want to live Gothic Times

Arnaud Carrere
Director, Alliance Française, Santiago de Cuba