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Wilfredo Prieto presents "Fake News’", an exhibition that is characterized by his minimalist oeuvre, mixed in with a hint of sarcasm and self-mockery. Although the physical exhibition in La Havana, Cuba was prematurely closed, a daily online presentation of twelve new works was featured from March 21 to April 30 via their Instagram and Facebook pages.
Reminding us of the daily exercise we all practice of reading the news, Prieto reads and translates his artistic vision of the news from the national and international press. His interpretation is simplistic in nature but allows the viewer to reflect on this information (or misinformation) by proposing a periodic reflection on #fake news and posterities.
Very much in line with Adrastus Collection’s initiative of keeping art alive and interrogative during these difficult times, we reached out to Wilfredo Prieto to discuss his concept behind the exhibition and its relevance to the current situation.
Adrastus Collection: Your exhibition "Fake News" is the first exhibition to be transmitted in real-time over their (and your) social media pages, can you explain the reasons behind choosing to publish in this way, and its reference the exhibition might have to the current pandemic?
Wilfredo Prieto: For me, it is something completely new. I publish practically nothing online. Basically, I have a passive look at social networks, but this way of working has emerged in a purely circumstantial matter. The truth is that before opening the exhibition, Cuba only had 25 cases of covid-19, so we were considering how to organize it with the public. "Fake News" opened normally and was active for a week. The idea was to show 12 daily paintings based on the news I read every day on my digital newspaper mobile. So we would be opening the exhibition daily, that implied that the opening would not be such a massive event, on the contrary, people could go any day and the exhibition would be totally new. But everything took a radical turn, and we had to transform it into an online exhibition. I would say that this accidental change helped enrich, in some way, the interpretation of the project, which returned the material to its initial state, from a virtual terrain to its physical materialization and back to the online space, back and forth, as a snake that bites its tail.
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