About Artist

"Eye on the viewfinder: Yainyt Alcazar"

His photography exhibits a hard poetry, which can both discomfort narrow minds - which it seeks to do - and make people think - which it succeeds in doing.

Yainyt (Cárdenas, Matanzas, 1993), a civil engineer (2016), says that she found in photography a way to shout out her silences, fears and deepest sadness. While developing the professional activity for which she studied, she exercised this other profession, chosen, basically in the conceptual variant, through which, and in a self-referential way, she works the ironically patriarchal universe and the objectification of women. Her work exhibits a harsh poetry, which can make narrow minds uncomfortable - which is what she seeks - and make people think - which is what she achieves.

She is currently the technical director of the artistic creation group Inspirarte, which belongs to the Cuban Fund for Cultural Heritage. As part of group exhibitions and through participation in international fairs, some of her work has been seen in Cuba, Spain, Peru, Greece, Italy and Portugal.

This is his artist's statement:

‘I am encouraged by the faint hope of coming to understand myself.

‘I question and unbalance society's canonical and decadent ideal of beauty, as I believe it does not encourage respect for differences, and impacts on the perception of beauty itself. The recurring need to be accepted can affect self-esteem, psychological integrity and the ability to feel respected in a ‘diverse and full’ humanity.

‘In each self-portrait, and in an intimate way, I try not only to visualise the issues, but to visualise myself from them, feeling each story I tell, uniting the physical with the emotional. I honour the concept of transforming hidden sensations, experiences, feelings and pains into art’.

Next, Yainyt presents some of her photographic series. The texts used for this are mostly fragments taken from her sketchbooks; sometimes single sentences that are strung together; on other occasions, reflections in which the artist tries to put into words the impulses, motivations and anxieties that led her to create this or that work.

Dogma’ series

The relationship with our bodies, the social and historical identity of Cuba and the violence of machismo. I seek to show beauty in a ‘critical’ way or as ‘critical philosophy’, which consists, precisely, in analysing the limits of human reason in order to reach a true and well-founded knowledge or concept of beauty. Philosophical dogmatism implies maintaining a blind confidence in the possibility of reason as an organ of knowledge, this rationalist tradition had raised a metaphysical system without taking into account experience, based only on the principles of abstract reason.

Fading away’ series

Fear of disappearing at any moment.

Ghost’ series

Maybe I am a ghost.

Just a whisper in the perfect smoke.

A secret that no one knows,

That no one will ever hear.

Or, maybe, I'm a ghost,

Spectre of the wrong cause.

Fallen from pink.

Something that people fear…

Series ‘Woman Reminiscences of a Coat Rack’.

I began to remember myself as the piece on the coat rack for that imminent versatility to hang myself between four walls and remove myself completely from humanity.

I was moving further and further away from myself, but I couldn't move, all discernment became melancholy. I was still hanging on that rack as if I were just another piece of the four walls, and moving forward became more and more difficult.

Modern Art’ Series

Work-artist relationship. Sometimes I used to think that I was in control of the whole process of creation, until I began to notice its four phases. A process that started by ‘consuming’ everything I wanted to express, to show to the world in an image, my image, became more and more ‘addictive’, it ‘controlled’ me until I recurrently ‘died’.

A Thousand Faces’ series

Facing external voices and opinions, as if through a mirror.

‘Personality is very much about the way we look. The face is like a landscape’. (Michele Carrandie)

‘The diary of repressed feelings’.

Beyond what can be seen,

Survives on broken dreams,

Of heartbreaking memories,

Of sighs of life that rip minutes from you.

Clinging to a hope that hurts.

It must be something in the water, because every day it gets colder…

The Flowers of Evil’ series

Feminist stance of protest against contemporary clichés of seduction, against the voluntary submission of women, against gender stereotypes and the determinism of heredity. She asserts, through the self-portrait. To create an imaginary complex.

Inspired by the book of ‘damned’ poems The Flowers of Evil, by Charles Baudelaire, France, 19th century.

‘This book is a hospital open to all the insanities of the soul, to all the putrefactions of the heart, even if it were to cure them, but they are incurable. (Le Figaro, 5 July 1857)

By: Alex Fleites. From OnCuba News