Eduardo Ponjuán and René Francisco Rodríguez collaborated from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s and exhibited in Cuba and abroad during that time, notably in Mexico City, where this work was made and first shown in an exhibition of the same name. Both graduates of Havana’s Instituto Superior de Arte, they returned to ISA as faculty members in the late 1980s and mentored many of the artists who emerged in the following decade, among them Los Carpinteros and Yoan Capote. The duo Ponjuán-René Francisco was active during Cuba’s “Special Period” of the early to mid-1990s, a time of economic crisis that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and their works make wry comment on the cultural politics of that time.

The present triptych meditates on the relationship between “art” and “comfort” by juxtaposing familiar images that epitomize classic modernist tropes. Two facing armchairs recall the oft-quoted line by Henri Matisse that posits “an art that could be for every mental worker, for the businessman as well as the man of letters, for example, a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair that provides relaxation from fatigue” (“Notes of a Painter,” ed. J. Flam, Matisse on Art, Berkeley, 1995, p. 42). The plush blue armchairs bracket a recreation of the iconic installation photograph of The Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting 0.10, held in Petrograd in 1915, which featured Kazimir Malevich’s infamous Black Square, a “zero-point of painting” at once nihilist and utopian.

Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park