Works Currently on view:
Collection of M, Museum M, Leuven, June 29, 2024-April 29, 2029
Eshu (2023) is reflective of Ricardo Brey’s decades-long engagement with assemblage. His understanding that objects have individual identities and souls —a sentiment influenced by his Afro-Cuban spiritual heritage and upbringing—informs his belief that the life of an object can be renewed through its proximity to art. In this way, Eshu offers a bricolage reimagining of one of the most important deities of the Yoruba pantheon. In Afro-Cuban culture and Santaría religious practices, Eshu is the messenger of the gods and the first to receive offerings and prayers. This sacred figure lives at a crossroads, which Brey translates visually through the sculpture's cruciform base and headdress. Even as he deploys the strategies and materials central to Caribbean history, Brey is a rigorous student of Western art history. He joins a sophisticated engagement with Western tropes and leitmotifs to an undeniably Caribbean frame of aesthetic reference that is uniquely his own. Eshu demonstrates Brey’s aesthetic syncretism by drawing from Greek iconographies of the Archaic and Classical period, as the bust Brey appropriates is a replica of a sculpture from the temple of Aphaia at Aegina. Refuting reductive binarisms, Eshu surmounts divisions between myths, religions, and systems of thought and value to champion a holistic approach to understanding the human condition. “I articulate my art within the tradition of my cultural heritage not as a tradition keeper or as [a] folklore illustrator but rather as an innovator,” Brey explains, “tradition and contemporaneity meet each other and bring something new to [life].”
Text : Ricardo Brey exhibition "Obatalá" at Alexander Gray Asocietes, New York