EXHIBITED WORKS
Tall Gallery, Warehouse 17, La Fuerza Compound

Let Me Entertain You
by Valeria Cavestany

December 9 to 31, 2010

Entertainment as Enlightenment and Ecstasy

By Carlomar Arcangel Daoana

The value of entertainment is a currency in artforms that enjoy a large swath of audience, such as film or theater. Being isolated and singular, utterances of a human spirit in a given milieu, artforms created in solitude (like the majority of visual art and literature) don’t pre-suppose a group of people at the other end of the creative act. In fact, when referring to this audience, artists and writers generally talk about the “Watcher” and the “Reader”—an idealized form of spectator in the singular. Hence, to entertain, to make an audience happy, is not a conscious pursuit of these works. High level of seriousness—connected to arcane metaphors and abstract strategies—is the goal, the problematization of experience.

And yet, if Friedrich Schiller—a German artist who, together with Goethe and other Romanticism men, ushered the artistic period called Weimer Classicism—is to be believed, then “all art is dedicated to joy, and there is no higher and more serious task than of making people happy.” For him, entertainment is the highest pursuit and the end goal of all artforms—a belief that is subscribed by Valeria Cavestany, as exemplified by her show at the Finale Art File: Let Me Entertain You.

For years now, Cavestany has been producing artworks characterized with a certain ebullience of spirit, a preponderance of bright colors, and a dazzling array of forms that reference anything from mundane objects to religious iconography. The richness of materials which she uses affirms a varied, scintillating world—offering prodigious and intoxicating possibilities to her imaginative wanderings. She is in no way a specialist, concentrating on a particular medium and theme employed, ramified and exhausted till kingdom come. Like a child, she experiments, tries everything, and twists certain concepts to pull a joke, create sleight-of-hand magic or simply titillate the onlooker with a kind of wonderment that is a species of awe.

For what animates her artworks—be it watercolor, acrylic, assemblage, installation—is a life aware of places near and far, steep with tremendous beauty, informed with personal joys and longings. Cavestany—the woman, the artist, the modern-day bohemian— occupies that space where art and life bleed into each other, commingling into a heady mix of sensations which instantly welcome and gratify the audience. In looking at the works in Let Me Entertain You, one can deduce that the artist has been to countries teeming with wildlife, is puzzled and amazed by the relationship of humans with the animal kingdom, and is ponderous with a momentary concern that, now frozen in time by a painting, becomes an eternal point of contemplation.

We don’t go, however, to Cavestany’s works for touches of her biography lest we miss out on the more startling ideas, hard-won wisdom really, that govern them: that beauty tumbles extravagantly at any place, that culture and identity are more nuanced than we think they are, that the imagination is the enabling force for us to live a multiplicity of lives. The seriousness of her artworks lies in its complete devotion to the possibility of happiness despite, or because of, man’s implicit mortality and the looming void that surrounds him. When Cavestany tells us to have fun, it is a call for resistance.

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