Pavel Acosta Proenza at Guttenberg Arts

All my work revolves around stealing. In Cuba, after graduating from the Higher Institute of Art and with little access to unaffordable art materials, I stole dry paint from the crumbling city walls and the objects around me to do collages of recycled paint on paper and canvases. I wanted to survive as an artist in the same way people does in Cuba – smuggling the State resources within the black market as the way to compensate for low salaries and scarcities. I was interested in exploring the boundaries between destroying something, or commiting a crime and creating, as well as the concepts of etics and morality within my society.

Coming to live in the United States in 2010 impacted my work in many ways, but I couldn't renounce stealing. Although I now have easier access to art materials, I have had the possibility to appreciate masterpieces from mainstream museums such as MoMA or the Met, which I had only known through slides and books before. The exposure to these works led me to reconsider the genre of painting, its attributes and boundaries.

The source of materials is not the city walls anymore, but the museum walls. In the series entitled Wallscape (2013 - present), I intervene museums' permanent collection galleries to comment on the intitution's functions and my relationship with it. Museum walls and structures impersonate the its histories and ideologies. They are carriers of memories. For instance, in Wallscape (2013) at El Museo del Barrio, NY, I copied a painting from its permanent collection, which was hung in front of the wall I was assigned to work in. Part of the Museo´s Biennieal 2013, my work consisted of peeling off the paint from the wall, and making a collage with such paint ships. As part of this series, I intend to realize interventions other museums of the United States and abroad.

Another body of works consists of realizing detailed copies of masterpieces from museum collections, using rough construction materials – wall paint on drywall or sheetrock. I have already reproduced renown works by masters such as Vermeer, Van Gogh, Rembrandt, and Courbet. The sheetrock is mounted on a wooden structure and the works are always exhibited detached from the wall. Next to the painting, I include a QR code which allows the viewer to access the webpage featuring the original work. Thus, my low-tech works are like a ghost that finds its way back to the body through cutting edge technology.