This exhibition pulls its inspiration from the short story “Las capas” by Eloy Costa, a young Cuban writer and winner of the Onelio Jorge Cardoso Latin American Short Story Award. The main character has an obsession with hiding the color of the wall causing layers of paint to consume the interior space to the point of being trapped, as the author says, “trapped, amongst the bright light, within the white bulk.”

Layers, understood as a material and also as a procedure or action, have had specific functions at certain moments in the history of art. Paleolithic artists drew visual narratives on top of existing ones in caves and created so-called palimpsests of graphic information about daily life or events.

In the Middle Ages, manuscript scribes wrote and overwrote on parchments, even putting their own hand on ancient manuscripts before them. Renaissance painting and subsequent art historical periods  painted several scenes on the same support, overlapping them and adding to the complexity of the materials. In fashion, the number of layers in dress often defined the social classes. The examples are numerous and endless throughout history.

Costa’s story goes way beyond the historical ideas of superimposition and layering, bringing them to an extreme. It is no longer just about an aesthetic or technical layering, but an emotional extreme, blurring the line between beauty and pain. In literature, “layering” suggests an author’s weaving of different elements to a story, often stemming from one element like a character, setting, or dialogue. This exhibition does something similar, pulling from Costa’s ideas as a foundation, and layering on top of that foundation to explore a visual narrative.

The artists—Pavel Acosta, Ariamna Contino, Raúl Díaz, León Ferrari, José Manuel Fors, Reynier Leyva Novo, Elsa Mora, Ronald Morán, Carolina Sardi and José A. Toirac—explore different aspects reflected in Costa’s writing — the configuration of impossible spaces, and the exploration of shades of white — in paperwork, passe-partout, paintings, and mixed media. 

He had been hired to paint the walls white. It was a huge house, with stairs and several rooms.

The man began his task with the patience of a sponge. Layer after layer, he covered the old  green color, burying it like a fossil in a cave.

By the sixth coat of white paint there was no evidence that the house had ever been any other color. It looked spotless, so white that some walls illuminated others. The white reflected into more white. Like having been admitted to eternal heaven.

However, the man continued painting everything, layer after layer. And so, the process became a notable event. The once huge house began to look small with so many layers of white paint. It had grown from the inside.