ERIC CAHAN – RABBITS, RATS & CATS
2017-03-20Cahan visited Havana, Cuba and its nearby villages three times in 2016, spending significant time in El Barrio del Fanguito, where he was witness to Cuba’s social immobility and poverty, as well as to a lifestyle more in harmony with nature and the basic needs of its citizens than that of much of the West.
While in Cuba, Cahan took part in two Ayahuasca ceremonies, which opened his heart and mind to new ways of seeing, and gave him a sense of connection to the people around him, and to their own connection to their land. Rabbits, Rats, and Cats was born out of these experiences. It integrates Cahan’s artistic practices, presenting photography, painting, and a film documenting his alternative vision of Cuban life, where inhabitants are portrayed as hybrid animal-human forms and anthropomorphic extensions of their surroundings.
Using his photographs as a blueprint, Cahan enhanced each image through an alchemic treatment that tessellates the photographic surface, some of which is layered in oil paint, while other sections are reduced to phthalo shimmers, before the picture is finished with a crackle varnish that resembles the scaling in the initial strata. Cahan’s manipulations unmasks the supposed objectivity of the photographic process as the subjective perspective it is, while the arbitrary and often surreal details of the painted imagery acquire a documentary inevitability in conjunction with its photographic base.
Opposite – Fibonacci, 2016
Exhibition runs through to April 15th, 2017
Benrubi Gallery
521 West 26th Street
2nd Floor
New York
NY 10001
