Statements

The Artist’s Tools

The objects created by Juan Abuela celebrate the tools of the artist’s trade that transform ordinary wood into works of art.  With a particular and personal attitude about form and function, Abuela takes advantage of his carpenter’s skills to alter the wood so that the result appears to be painted metal or another plasticine substance.  Forms are bent and abstracted into curvilinear and obtuse angles that defy the material’s rigidity and hardness and result in a diversity of atypical shapes and configurations.  The surfaces are pristine.  Their glossy effects add a significant dimension to the work’s overall aesthetic as its reflective quality serves to bring the viewer into its space in a direct way.  An impersonal, inorganic object is no longer static but achieves a more dynamic result as its mirror-like quality contrasts to the hardness of the wood and its edges. 

            Abuela describes his approach to sculpture as metaphorical and inspired by an inner drive to create a response to everyday reality.  He uses the solid and tangible to reveal the intangible; the functional to reflect on an inner consciousness that exists on a universal level.  It is a metaphysical approach to investing a seemingly inert object with psychological power.  He sees within a piece of wood and finds the origins of nature that it represented before it was made into something else.  Some of the wood he has transformed and constructed is recognizable as furniture – drawers, cabinets, shelves – that take on new, non-functional meaning as modern independent shapes.  He reinterprets their original purpose in whimsical combinations that often perform with absurdity and force a re-interpretation of purpose and reconsideration of how art is made. 

The fascination with everyday objects, the utilitarian versus the non-utilitarian, is the focus of Juan Abuela’s work. His sculpture confronts wood's property and presents a paradox of meaning that extends into two-dimensional work. Now experimenting with painting, he incorporates objects onto the surface to disrupt material appearance and challenge spatial order and composition. The same interpenetration of art and non-art in painting and sculpture is the artist’s defiance of the ordinary shaped by a commitment to personal expression.

Carol Damian | 14 March 2021

From Wonderer to Wondered

In the same way that poets use the language of writing to convey a deep and intuitive message, Juan Abuela's sculptures go beyond their form and function envisaged in the apparently ordinary and practical objects that accompany us every day and that he discretely chooses to transform them into powerful metaphorical messages that deeply reflect the difference between the apparent and the tangible of the deep and intriguing human nature.

Since his beginnings as an artist, Juan Abuela has been concerned with giving continuity to the legacy inherited in the family tradition of carpentry and amalgamating his need with the disquieting thoughts that guide his creative force. Juan Abuela is of the deep belief that the constant concern for the apparent in today’s society is deliberately and constantly eroding the connections with our inner being and that through his sculptural messages, tries to awaken in us the reflection towards the need to reconnect with what is essential and truly important in life.

The objects that Juan adopts rebel into capricious forms in which each artwork is but a conducive metaphor that analogously represents a branch of the subconscious. Juan places special emphasis on the imperfections in the finish of his work as did Velázquez and many Renaissance artists, whose works revealed "pentimenti", the Italian word used in painting to express visual repentance in art without resorting to correction. , thus giving us a human dimension rarely seen in sculptural representations and other art manifests today.

Juan Abuela is a deeply informed artist, disciplined student of art history, and admirer of those artists who like him challenged perceptions of space and the reuse of objects in art such as Louise Nevelson, Frank Stella, Ettore Tsotssas and his fellow Cuban artists Los Carpinteros among many others. He cares deeply about transmitting a message through the reinterpretation of an object whose inherent function first awakens our curiosity and then in its inquisitive presence directs us to a state of internal challenge, whose ultimate purpose is to lead us from our errant and erroneous path, to rest in the serenity of external and internal contemplation and turn our wanderer self into and wondered one.

Francisco Arevalo | 25 February 2021

Juan Abuela’s sculptures have emanated naturally from his art training and his activity as a consummate fine arts framer. They are whimsical approximations of the archetypal theme of enclosures as expressed in furniture, rooms, and other design objects and architectural spaces. From the Renaissance to Surrealism, this archetype has provided us with an immediate and familiar mode of representing the many layers of memory, dream, and the unconscious. Indeed, the link between architecture (and furniture, by extension) and memory can be traced back to the 6th century BCE, to thinker and poet Simonides of Ceos, as studied with singular elegance by Frances Yates in The Art of Memory. Abuela’s sculptures make that bridge between architecture and furniture evident in an idiom which is contemporary, particularly by virtue of its ambiguities and multiple tones. These polished works bend, coil, and otherwise rebel against the functional rigidity we expect from cabinets. Postmodernist design and architecture, of course, revels in fluidity, an attribute which Abuela draws on. In contemporary Cuban sculpture, Los Carpinteros, and in particular Alexandre Arrechea, are also precursors, as is Dalí and other Surrealists. Abuela, however, is more interested in the humorous dimension of these subversions of our presuppositions. The forms whip and spill, twist and entwine, as if recovering the fanciful vitality they have in childhood dreams. This freedom to distort is also common in digital creations. However, Abuela’s sculptures are highly crafted, not computer fantasies, and they escape function, not simply eradicate it, enabling this artist to keep both the quotidian and the aesthetic dimensions of his images simultaneously present in the viewer’s mind.

Ricardo Pau-Llosa | 16 September 2020