HAVANA.- GALLERIA CONTINUA / Habana is presenting the second chapter of Mientras el día no cierre II (“Until Daylight Fades”), a group exhibition that, on this occasion, brings together Cuban artists Alejandro Cañer, José Miguel Costa, Fidel García, Jorge Luis Marrero, and Glenda Salazar. The exhibition evokes that liminal moment before nightfall, when light still lingers and, with it, the possibility to imagine, to sustain, and to create.
Conceived as a gesture of generosity and artistic collaboration, the exhibition arises from a dynamic of peer-to-peer invitation: artists connected to the gallery invite other creators who reside and work on the island, activating a network of affections, complicity, and shared urgencies. In this second chapter, Carlos Garaicoa invites Alejandro Cañer; Luis Enrique López-Chávez invites José Miguel Costa; Alejandro Campins invites Fidel García; Iván Capote invites Jorge Luis Marrero; and Susana Pilar invites Glenda Salazar.
Since its first edition, inaugurated in November 2025, the exhibition has established itself as a space where creativity and resistance intertwine as a vital force. That “day” that has not yet come to a close refers not only to a temporal dimension, but to a symbolic territory where artistic practice persists, even under adverse conditions.
Alejandro Cañer presents two series that address, through the digital language, the relationships between image, power, and identity. Fictional Country and El núcleo del Bizarrón (“The Bizarrón Core”) explore the presence of queer subjectivities in heteropatriarchal contexts, as well as the fictional construction of history and Cuban political graphic art. Each image functions as an exercise in critically reinterpreting the Cuban visual imaginary of the second half of the twentieth century, where past and present intertwine in a self-fictional narrative. Through the use of color and the manipulation of visual codes, the series tensions official narratives, opening space for other forms of representation.
In the main gallery space, two installations by José Miguel Costa engage in a dialogue around the hidden and the revealed, what is concealed and what is allowed to be seen, promise and fulfillment. In the first, a set of objects simulating gift packages is arranged on the wall like an expanding constellation. Wrapped in canvas printed with Christmas wrapping paper motifs, the pieces create an ambiguous visual quality: familiar and strange, domestic and monumental at once. The gift functions here as a metaphor: an object conceived to be opened, which holds inside something that the exterior barely suggests. The evocation of Christmas operates not as a mere decorative resource, but as a stimulus activating a specific cultural reminiscence. In the Cuban context, this holiday has undergone processes of suppression, recovery, and resignification, having been lived for decades from within intimacy and invention. Cómo tararear un villancico en tu cabeza (“How to Hum a Carol in Your Head”) is presented, in this regard, as a gesture of memory, resistance, and deliberate optimism.
Meanwhile, in El pasado monocromo (“The Monochrome Past”), the boxes are wrapped in a palette of grays, whites, and blacks that align to generate an irregular urban silhouette, where certain outbreaks of sky—composed of fragments of blue and clouds—function as windows, as breaths or promises that memory has not yet released. The past to which the work alludes is not documentary, but personal and imprecise. Both pieces, in their contrast, propose a reflection on memory as a field of tension between expansion and containment.
In the central space, Fidel García presents Desnaturalización (“Denaturalization”), a project conceived as a prototype of a social model based on the individual’s self-exclusion. Drawing from studies of ecosystems, their balance, and the repercussions generated when their conditions are unfavorable, a model is created that extrapolates proven strategies: a system that prioritizes autonomy, self-sufficiency, and self-determination as strategies for survival. The project is articulated through a set of parameters—such as the optimization of inhabitable space and the use of analysis algorithms and basic communication systems—that configure a constantly evolving structure.
In this way, the artist seeks to reflect on the individual’s relationship with the environment, completely severing it from dependence on the collective and assuming individuality as a process of transgression, in which singularity gives prominence to an expansion of possibilities previously limited by the system’s need to keep us in groups. Conceived as a work in progress, the artwork not only speculates on possible forms of future organization, but also questions inherited collective models, proposing a reconfiguration of the relationships between individual, territory, and community.
Jorge Luis Marrero’s practice unfolds in El responso del guerrero (“The Warrior’s Resting Reproof”), a piece belonging to a series in which the artist reproduces—with meticulous accuracy—drawings made during his childhood and preserved by his mother. These images are transferred to new media and scales, and reinterpreted in wire structures that generate an ambiguity between drawing and sculpture. This material displacement not only alters the original condition of the line, but introduces a spatial dimension that reactivates the initial gesture from the present. Through this process of self-appropriation, the artist reflects on identity as a mutable construct, shaped by time and distance. The dialogue with his childhood self is not approached from nostalgia, but as an exercise in reinterpretation and re-contextualization that questions the idea of authenticity in art and in self-representation.
On the second level of the gallery, Glenda Salazar presents the Proyecto Renovación (“Renovation Project”), developed from the study of plants devastated after the passage of Hurricane Irma over the island in 2017. Interested in processes of damage and regeneration in nature, the artist establishes a parallel with social dynamics linked to territory and the reconfiguration of the collective. In contrast to the idealization of traditional botanical drawing—precise, static, normative—Salazar focuses on the traces of damage: the marks, scars, and variations that evidence interaction with the environment. The notion of renewal runs through the project as an active gesture—not only to document loss, but to foster processes of restitution.
In dialogue with this project, Kingdom features construction carts or wheelbarrows loaded with soil and grass that address the notion of belonging. The Persian poet Rumi evokes this idea in his parable “The Three Fish,” which inspires the artist as she reflects and asks us: “The soil you can carry is truly your soil. Where is your soil?” In doing so, she shifts the idea of territory from a fixed space toward a mobile condition. Within this framework, the work opens up to an interpretation linked to displacement and migration, where the connection to one’s place of origin is not severed but rather reconfigured. The transported soil operates as a metaphor for the experience of life, suggesting an understanding of belonging as a dynamic process that endures even in conditions of mobility.
Mientras el día no cierre II (“Until Daylight Fades II”) projects itself as a collaborative platform that explores the persistence of artistic practice in limiting contexts, articulating reflections on memory, identity, and forms of social organization. Through languages such as installation, sculpture, work with organic materials, and digital manipulation of archives, the works address tensions between concealment and revelation, processes of damage and regeneration, the ever-changing construction of the self, and the critical reassessment of cultural imaginaries. Altogether, the exhibition proposes a space of convergence where different formal and conceptual strategies examine the present and rehearse possible symbolic and social reconfigurations.
