In promoting Double Exposure, the exhibition of works by Cuban artist Carlos Garaicoa, (in parallel with the show at Galleria Continua), Almeida & Dale are presenting works seen by few Brazilians, yet internationally recognized among curators and collectors ever since the 58-year-old artist kicked off his career in the 90s. In the same decade Cuba had begun facing economic decline due to the lack of support from the extinct Soviet Union which, when combined with the US embargo, made artistic production on the island practically impossible.

It should be noted that the Cold War was a decisive factor in leading Cuban architecture, Garaicoa’s principal source of interest, to swallow the bitter pill of stagnation. With no investment in the area, over time many buildings were abandoned, leaving Cuban heritage severely compromised. Havana, the artist’s home city, became a ruin. In his installations, sculptures, drawings and photomontage (such as Puzzles, on show here), Garaicoa, a painter by training and architect by vocation, takes a fresh approach to the memory of urban spaces, focusing in particular on the Cuban capital. Some of these works have been shown in exhibitions that include Documenta in Kassel, the Venice Biennale and museums such as the Guggenheim in New York.

Among Garaicoa’s recent works (produced in 2025) are photographs reworked in a range of materials such as digital printing on flexible plasterboard and Aconitum wood (Aconite), in which vegetation insistently invades a ruin in Havana. Here Garaicoa plays with the contrast between the mathematical precision of the architectural design and the chaotic nature of the vegetation which subverts this order as it comes into contact with the ruin. The Aconite plant, which lends its name to the work, is poisonous. In fact, it was used by the dictator Stalin to kill his political adversaries.

The artist’s attention shifted from architecture to nature during the pandemic. An example of this conflicting relationship between culture/nature comes in the aforementioned plant which crushes an already detonated building with its roots, as seen in another digital print, Atropa belladonna, from the same year.

Garaicoa’s best known series, Puzzles, is represented in this exhibition by works produced last year: electrostatic photographs in which he reconstructs ruined buildings as if they were pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. The artist also makes use of nails and lines over the photographic print to “reconstruct” beautiful buildings that today are mere skeletons under a gray sky, vestiges of a city on the verge of disappearing.

Garaicoa invokes the name of German romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), known for his metaphysical landscapes, in order to justify his frequent use of Cuba’s urban ruins. These are allegories of a forced exile in his own country, which, according to the artist, is “finished” as a modern utopia. For someone who studied to become a visual artist and looked to Bauhaus as a reference, these ruins represent the “collapse” of Cuban society.

One of the works in the exhibition, with its pointedly ironic title, sums up the question: All Utopias Go Through the Belly (2025). In this installation glass jars filled with different types of grains, preserves, and architectural models produced by the artist, comment on the conflicted relationship between humans and their environment, given that throughout the history of civilization every issue of territory “passes through food”, Garaicoa suggests. “We have two recent examples, Gaza and Ukraine”, notes the artist, who considers himself a child of the conceptual art created 60 years ago by North American Joseph Kosuth.