Mayet grew up in the hubbub of the intellectual and artistic environment of Havana, amidst the comfortable background of a middle class segregated by the political regime itself. Although the Sons of the Revolution generation do not witness the armed struggle, they grow amidst the revolutionary literature and rhetoric. Elevated to heroic heights after the struggle against the dictatorship, the countryside is now subject to periodical mobilizations and military interventions. The foundations of economy, that which had been turned into landscape through the stylization of painting, the sons of the Revolution’s farmland, becomes an inherited burden.

The timeless quality of Jorge Mayet’s landscapes may be the response to this depoliticizing and cooling off crisis. They are paintings that incorporate the instant quality of photography and that therefore speak in present time but projecting at times an infinite distance onto them in such a way that a country landscape becomes“the country” (or a fragment of a single infinite country) and a bohío (typical Cuban country cabin), “the bohío”. All trace of the tropical has vanished in the process. The spirit of the place impregnates everything that is intangible, like the clouds or the waves (undoubtedl y from the Caribbean Sea). The paintings can be seen as an accumulation of brushstrokes whereby Jorge Mayet exercises (involuntarily, in “exile”) the disciplined willpower, the determined dedication of his formative years. The reiterative monotony encompas sed within a frame of an organized anonymous order allows for the hypnotic transformation of the totalitarian mass production and the uproar into a state of vacuum in which things become present through their exclusion. There is an internal victory a sort of state of mind, evidently antagonistic to the historical emphasis of the previous generation.

The smoothness of his style, after having emigrated to Europe and become a Spanish resident, is comparable to a curtain or coating. In the manner of someone who no longer deals with facts, it is significant that previous to the canvas, the wooden plank or the board, before picking up the paint brushes, he resorts to the pixelated puzzle of the computer. When he crossed the Atlantic he estranged himself from that same scenario that would become an obsession . The circumstances were as follows: the scenarios were ghostly and empty, the facts, having already taken place , were a mere convulsion in the air. The clamour of the computer screen no longer produced any meaning. The contrite serenity of the vegetative, celestial and oceanic surfaces would be the great curtains and folding screens of this emptiness. In short, and precisely due to the loss of visibility the maker of these works had turned into a voyeur of that which was no longer visible.

The seas of vegetation or the sea itself do not undergo a pictorial transformation within that separation -approximation dialectics. They are allegorical paintings of Cuban themes. These paintings reach a point of fine equil ibrium in which the voyeuristic session and the melancholic evocation leave their subtle imprint on the rusty iron of History. The “death” of the avant-garde movement during the seventies was parallel to the “death” of the Cuban Revolution (and the war to any sort of deviationism and aestheticism was declared) . One would have to situate Mayet’s work between these “deaths” (although in Mayet’s plastic language they would be assimilated as “disappearances”). Therefore, besides being a transaction with the émigré’s (or the exile’s) drive, it would be a transaction that would take place within the scope of Cuban history (and the fate of a revolutionary idea) and the History of Art.

The sculptures are transformed objects on this side of the Atlantic Ocean by someone who has experienced the “ délire du touché". Their existence, their material contribution does not obliterate that which is absent in them. The manipulation of the materials entail a kind of sortilege as the trees of these sculptures project a series of religious beliefs imported from Africa. Humboldt, the German naturalist, set the iconic basis for the annotation of the American tropical and subtropical flora . These objects exist above all as axial points of intersection between illustration and myth. In a previous rapprochement to formal speculation they may stand as cornerstones or foundation beams for a concept of the Cuban nation. They are objects that, while assuming all this, have a tendency to disperse, burst or be dragged. They are sculptures that are hanging without a support, mobile with a small degree of freedom that allows for an almost imperceptible rotation, always on the verge of varying their angle slightly. In one instant we visualize a stage setting for the first act of a representation of Macbeth in a theatre of Havana and suddenly the angle of the sculpture varies and the scene changes altogether. The greater presence of the material and tactile can provoke a longing for the pictorial, but not the pictorial in its material nature but on its logistic or syntactical aspect as the latent presence of the frame, its delimitation by a rectangle, the earth line, the intersection of diagonals in the centre of the picture and its relation to the central theme etc. The aforementioned clearly accounts for the unquestionable pictorial condition, among other aspects, of the sculpture exhibited in Art Basel Miami . It was a work that following the poetic logistics of what we have been discussing so far, disintegrated and the fact that its dispersed fragments, whether together or isolated, stayed trapped within the scope of vision allows for the discourse of the new work of art.

--Sebastià Camps