Nadal Antelmo
Nadal Antelmo / Nadalito (Cárdenas, 1968) is an artist of contempt and permutations. Unprejudiced and experimental, he has developed an atypical work in the contemporary scene, managing to reinstate, from an original perspective, preterified practices of a sociological foundation. The participatory component structures the basis of its thematic transitions. Nadal plunges into the contexts he dissects, orchestrating a playful promiscuity that blurs the traditional boundaries between actor, producer and editor of “certified documents.” A predator that symbolically “owns” its members by activating the contextual anchors of a subverted script.
Self-taught, very early on showed an exceptional capacity in the harmonious processing between the contentious and the formal. Intuitive in the inflection of its plots, it has managed to expediently record “uncomfortable” areas, where the intimate, public, ethical and the ideological converge. Considered a maker of “conceptualized realities” he has developed an infallible historicity that takes advantage of the technological tools without purism or prejudices. His coatings, graphics, fissures, and overlays, intermingle in the licentious use of those who at all costs, seek to give us an emotional blow. Nadal also formalizes a particular use of full color; a management that was unprecedented in the insular panorama of the moment, reluctant to detach itself ,with few exceptions from certain “comfort zones” set in black and white. The polychromatic film is established in the artist’s execution, opening a heterogeneous path of possibilities.
100 Cuban family portraits recover the strategies deployed in networks between 2007 and 2010. All carried out in the residence of its protagonists, it is a prototypical panorama that dives into everyday life. The concept of vulnerability is shown by shoes being reissued on top the subject’s heads. Semillas (2012) remains in a fabulous terrain between the utopia of renewal and the improbability of harvest, a row of figures are persuaded to germinate as the only element of salvation. On the other hand, El Mirón II (2018) and Erotic Story (2003) are related to breaking the norm with erogenous connotations of public sign. In both pieces, origins of an accomplice ritual are pressed, permissive contents are sublimated in the conception of the photographic framing.
Perception (2018) and Gotas de Miami (2019) are created in a new location. The syllables of elliptical narratives that Nadal created in 2003 as an unprecedented and de-constructive technique based on the iconic reverberation of a word that is now cemented in a new language - English - which was adopted by the artist as a second language. They also mutate the emblematic images of their new environment at the moment after raindrops hit. Areas gained from the swamp that water “claims” to be is seen as stubborn crying.
Isabel María Pérez Pérez
