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William Pérez and Adrián Rumbaut: A collaborative installation ENTRE NOS / BETWEEN US.

The Cuban Art Space presents the first New York showing of the installation “Entre Nos” (Between Us), a collaboration of fellow Cienfuegos artists William Pérez and Adrián Rumbaut, two of Cuba’s best, and internationally recognized, young artists. The installation, a combination of spiraling construction with mobile parts, paintings, handmade objects, and appropriated everyday articles, i.e., plastic shopping bags (jabas) and white dress shirts (guayaberas), will fill the main gallery of the Art Space. Conceived together and assembled from a series of exacting drawings by Pérez, the combined vision of these two artists crafts both illusory and revealing autobiography as well as a metaphor for Cuba itself.

William Pérez is the recipient of more than twenty prizes in Cuban art competitions, and has had more than fifteen one-man shows at home and abroad, including the Cuban Art Space, NYC. In 2000 he was a visiting artist at the Art Institute of Boston, and in November of the same year participated in the highly regarded 7^th Havana Biennial. Most recently Pérez had a solo show at the eminent Wifredo Lam Center in Havana, and just completed a three-month residency at the Nordic Arts Center in Dale, Norway. Sculptor and installation artist, Pérez works methodically in the diminutive or on a grand scale. His monumental sculptures are installed in public spaces in Cuba and Europe.

Adrián Rumbaut has participated in more than fifty exhibitions in Cuba and abroad, including “Viva Cuba!” at the Alva Gallery, Connecticut in 2001, and in group shows in 2000–2001 at the Cuban Art Space. He has earned more than twenty awards, and first prizes, including the 2001 first prize from the Salon Provincial, Cienfuegos. Rumbaut’s work is widely collected, both public and private, in Cuba and around the world. His work combines painting and handmade objects in installation settings.

For more information on exhibitions and artists:
e-mail: slevinson@cubanartspace.net.

Holland Cotter — New York Times, Friday, January 3, 2003, page E42

William Pérez and Adrian Rumbaut, who are founding members of the collective El Grupo Punto in Cuba, have collaborated on this exhibition by integrating their distinctive individual work into a kind of walk-in installation. The effect is like an odd-lot shop filled with random stock: shirts, tote bags, bird cages, art supplies. But every item has been customized to carry evidence, however fragmentary, of the artists' pasts.

Paint-splattered palettes hanging on the wall, for example, are secondhand items, but also something more. They're the palettes Mr. Rumbaut used from 1991, when he graduated from art school with a degree in painting, to 1995, when he began to combine painting with other media.

A recent series of painted self portraits suggests where he's going with such exploration. Each portrait is disjointed, assembled like a puzzle from several small paintings. And each of the small paintings is enclosed within a small wooden bird cage of a kind handmade by the artist's grandfather in the Cuban countryside. Whether it is an image of imprisonment or protection is the question.

Mr. Pérez was also trained in a traditional art, sculpture, which he continues to practice but has also pushed in nonacademic directions. His display of white satin Cuban dress shirts, each embroidered with pregnant words and phrases, is very much a sculptural work. So is the series titled “Reliquaries,” using the kind of clear plastic shopping bags ubiquitous in working-class Cuba, which Mr. Pérez has filled with personal mementos of his life. One holds grade school report cards and holy pictures; another, miniature sculptures from art school; a third, memorabilia from a recent artist's residency in Europe.

Mr. Pérez has provided written commentary on these little autobiographical suitcases, and it is well worth reading. Like the works themselves, his words are clear, candid and rich with ideas and ideals.