The SunPost

Gean Moreno’s Untitled, 2006, made of photocopies, acrylic, fabric and spray paint on canvas. Image courtesy of the artist

Florida International University has been involved with the selection of finalists and the disbursement of the generous Cintas Foundation Fellowships in Visual Arts grants since 1993. Rewarding the accomplishments of artists of Cuban lineage who reside outside of Cuba, Cintas grants confer on contemporary artists a highly esteemed seal of approval, not to mention a meaningful monetary investment in their careers. Sort of a Cuban Guggenheim award, the roster of recipients over the years includes artists, writers and composers who have made advanced contributions to the contemporary art scene. The exhibition of works by this year’s finalists is installed at FIU’s Frost Art Museum through Sept. 16. The works included were curated by the Cintas Fellows Collection manager, Ingrid LaFleur Rogers, and they encompass painting, sculpture, photography and installation. Emptiness, muteness, disintegration and banality are themes that collectively unite the works by artists Alexandre Arrechea, Maria Martinez-Cañas, Gean Moreno, Wilfredo Prieto and Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova.

Alexandre Arrechea, a former member of the artist collective Los Carpinteros, now lives and works in Madrid. His clear glass punching bags are suspended from the gallery ceiling, and each contains handfuls of dust from four cities where the artist has worked. The containers are marked with their origin and they are pristine, in contrast to the rubble within. This idea of collecting and labeling material is pretty ho-hum — a didactic gesture that inspires a mechanical response. Technical finesse can’t carry this work. In contrast, Arrechea’s drawings on view, and his previous works generally, project the viewer imaginatively into dystopic architectural objects and spaces. The elongated horizontal formats permit him to indulge his obsession with mechanical drawing while releasing his dreamy, visionary self, and they are more rewarding.

Miami artist Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova creates a Rooms-to-Go analogue for Richard Serra’s “Tilted Arc,” arranging “pleather” sectionals and recliners into a closed loop. While “Two Sectionals Creating Closure” certainly satisfies some of the simplest precepts of a “readymade” work (this term was coined by French artist Marcel Duchamp, who designated already existing manufactured objects as art merely by selecting or mildly altering them), it feels gimmicky. A suggestive drawing of this concept might have provided a more vivid experience; even an altered photograph would have depicted a metamorphosis, an invention. As it is, the physical presence (real space, actual size) of this furniture robs this work of lightness and humor. Rodriguez-Casanova has made a career by affectionately skewering the mainstream Miami Cubanisms/suburbanisms of his upbringing, to mixed effect. The high art/low life thing comes off as slumming, and the context of the gallery space does all the work.

Prieto’s installation, “Mute,” assigns to a small blackened gallery the visual sensations of a disco, with lights rotating and flashing their colors on the empty floor and walls, sans audio. Again, all this is too easy. The payoff for being in that space, absorbing that work, is so paltry. The viewer brings a physical body, some sensory apparatus, an imagination, maybe even an aesthetic — take her somewhere, please!

More complex, interesting work is Maria Martinez Cañas’ photographs of erased artworks in gallery and museum settings, titled “Adaptations.” They have exquisite soft surfaces whose painterly gray tones resemble watercolors. These works have an intimate scale that beckons you to peer into their spaces to uncover a mystery. They are refreshing on a technical level. Photography is such an open, varied medium. Not every photographic or digital image requires colossal format color printing and mounting to aluminum to impress.

So far, the Cintas finalists have offered an inaccessible seating arrangement; an empty, mute dance floor; glass containers holding pulverized matter; the erasure of images. All these works testify to an absence of content, an absence of meaning. Slightly more maximalist are the works of this year’s award recipient, Miami’s Gean Moreno. In addition to producing artworks in various media, Moreno has been a prolific writer and curator, involved in projects that identify trends in trans-global avant-garde contemporary art. The untitled works on traditional stretchers he presents here gain some confrontational heft from being free-standing, attached as they are to two-by-fours that run from floor to ceiling. Moreno presses all manner of unorthodox collage material into service, despite its technical limitations. Photocopies, stickers, spray paint, scraps of fabric, metallic tape, magazine clippings, even small reproductions of works by other artists are utilized in an abstract expressionist manner. The resulting works exhibit enthusiastic gestures, but remain detached, clinical, intellectual experiments. Maybe Moreno is trying to stretch the limits of what paintings can contain, or how much imagery can be in an assemblage, but like a bachelor playing the field, he doesn’t commit.

The 2007 Cintas Fellowship Finalist Exhibition is on view through Sept. 16 at the the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, Florida International University, SW 107th Avenue and Eighth Street. Call 305-348-2890.

Michelle Weinberg is an artist and writer in Miami Beach and New York. Find her online at www.michelleweinberg.com.