Abajo / Down
When I get up, I usually drink a glass of water and take a bath. Drinking it, I check to find out if it has been boiled or not. Bathing, I breathe with care to determine if the twines of the water smell good or bad.
Doing these things, I like to contemplate the ideas that come to my mind from yonder concerning what could possibly happen at my work during the rest of the day and, while enjoying an endless meditation, I let the water flow like a tributary that forks over my body and connects me with the rest of the world, as if the words in my mind would run, escaping with my sweat through the holes in the drain: “Lovely, the voice of the water flowing down the stairs, my words foaming on the keel through the quiet water, to the lukewarm river bed of water, black waters of an unknown destination, although the water is always transparent and lets you see the bottom ground, stony orb thrown into eternal waters, like a fog on the waters, flickering water, eye that watches, stairs of water supporting its eyes, water and fire fairly nonchalant, ‘aguas estimadas que han de istmarse’, that wash their feet with sparkling water”.
When these decorations made of tubes become artful decorations, they are no longer tied to this private place where I forged them but will be what they have always been: fragments of the abundant current that filters everyone’s imagination, I’ll be able to imagine all those people who will place their bodies on them, like a big tributary they are going to receive, like a historic water flowing in the city, like books and toys reposing in one of these chairs or shelves where my memory has already been resting. Tony el tubero, Mies van der Rohe, the piping of Mart Stam, the stepping-stones of Gelsenkirchen. Perhaps in some moments of their lives, sunken as the liquid that buds from this idea, they imagine themselves as rebels, as distracted or utopian as me, and then will arrive like the water, the gas or simple the great emptiness, deep down. ( R. F. Rodriguez)
(Holguín, Cuba 1960) Lives and works in Havana, Cuba
As one of the most important contemporary Cuban artists and a professor of the Instituto Superior de Arte de la Habana (ISA), René Francisco has formed the nineties generation of artists, who support and undertake individual and collective projects of a social nature.
