October, (2019-2021) (Spanish version)

Red is linked to blood, power, heat and fire, pain and courage. This is a color not only with expressive associations for our perception but also with a historical endorsement that relates it to the most resounding revolutionary processes in history, such as the Russian and Chinese revolutions, with red being the predominant color of their respective flags. And red has been precisely the chromatic hue of greater visual weight in the works that make up the series October, by photographer William Riera, as red becomes the leitmotif of a discourse that seeks to emphasize the importance of certain elements in the composition, which is not an added bonus of the artist, but rather a compelling reason for interpretation.

These works contain the nostalgic symbiosis of a subject who remembers his past through the experiences of the present. They turn out to be a personal travelogue in which the longings of a time he lived and felt in body and soul are fused from the strong presence and significance that Russia had for Cuban culture and society, strongly tinged now by a contemporary sensibility that is linked to the life experience of a high percentage of Cubans who will also find in these images the evocation of a latent past: VEF radios, cute and expressive toys, noisy Russian alarm clocks, cartoons, and a whole range of objects and remembrances that have endured until today as vestiges of a bygone time.

However, for those younger people who may find in these photographs a certain fascination and distance from the elements that William Riera has captured during his trips to Russia, they will also be able to assimilate in them the identity iconography of a Russia that preserves memories while assuming contemporaneity with vertiginous dynamism; in which red manifests its intensity in the present, besides being indebted of the Cuban national historical tradition.

These works are the tangible reflection of a nostalgic and prevailing way of looking, which from an artistic approach, has touched the heartstrings of its creator.

Yenny Hernández Valdés
Art Historian and Curator
Havana, Cuba, 2020

I, a Communist Pioneer

My portrait in 5th grade, wearing my red neckerchief scarf and my red pants, as mandated by Cuban Educational System’s standards. Up to the present time, in Communist Cuba and China, children are forced to wear these attributes as part of their school clothing as a reminder of their commitment to their respective regimes.

Once upon a time there was a child at Havana's Lenin Park...

Mother Russia

Das Kapital

Hurray for Comunism!

The Closet

Listening to Alla Pugacheva with the VEF radio music player

Katyusha

Cheburashka

El Porfiao (The Stubborn one)

Well, Just You Wait!

Let's go to The L'Ermitage

Babushka (Grandma)

Tabarish Gagarin

To the militias!

Seventeen Moments of Spring

At the tomb of Vyacheslav Vasilyevich Tikhonov in Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow. He was a Soviet and Russian actor whose best known role was as Soviet spy, Stierlitz, in the twelve-part Soviet television series Seventeen Moments of Spring.

The Kremlin