Nelson Jalil
 

At its core, Nelson Jalil’s work is an exploration of tension. Jalil’s burning libraries, for which he is well known, often leave viewers feeling tense. The act of book burning naturally has that effect on people. Through the glowing whites and layers of orange and yellow, the flames call to mind — as the artist often acknowledges — centuries of censorship, ideological control, and protest. The artist brings this history to his work, using censorship that occurs in his native Cuba as a point of departure.
Nevertheless, there is something paradoxically beautiful about Jalil’s burning libraries that tempers the act of political violence. Jalil creates a magical space that hovers between reality and the artist’s own imagined, almost-Borgesian vault of human knowledge. The viewer must find his or her own balance in the tensions that emerge between the visceral politics of book burning, from any cultural background, and the beautiful scene Jalil creates. After all, the viewer is “always looking,” in the words of John Berger, “at the relation between things and ourselves,” and Jalil leaves just enough ambiguity for the viewer to do so in order to find meaning in these powerful images.
Jalil’s Amnesia series in its entirety exists within the tension of artistic beauty and the destruction of human knowledge. In conversations with the artist, he explains that the series began with fire, but found other possible scenarios. Flooding, winds, and even negligence — represented in Jalil’s work as a jungle-like overgrowth in an abandoned library — are all possible threats to the archive.
As such, the series embodies something beyond the sum of its parts. In each individual scene is also a sense of balance, due to the works’ play on the four classical elements: fire, earth, air, and water. Attributed to the Pre-Socratic Greeks, the notion that fundamental elements comprise all reality, nature, and humanity was common across ancient cultures. Each element that Jalil paints, has the power to destroy, but also has a significance to life. Earth provides fertility, air provides breath, water provides purification, and fire illumination and energy. As such, the elements also embody transformation and movement; the idea that something can be reborn, adapted, or grown.
Beyond Amnesia, Jalil’s series The Country of Empty Pools explores the tensions that come with decay. In these works, Jalil turns to the phenomenon of empty pools, full of rusted pipes and sun-stained tiles, that are found throughout Cuba. These once-functioning public pools offered recreation and respite to communities, but remain empty and abandoned. Today, in Jalil’s eyes, they are a metaphor for the sense of decay that dominates the island and a tension between Cuba’s past and present.
Bad Day For a Poet in Miami and Manual to Fight Laziness also explore tensions, though in stark contrast to the empty pools he paints previously. Bad Day…, for example, proposes something personal; the viewer’s ability to find peace between misfortune and letting things go. Books sink to the bottom of the pool and papers float on top, but we cannot help but be lost in the glistening water, knowing all well that we can forget about the things that tie us down. These works almost serve as an invitation to take a vacation from everything, to disconnect even from the things that we do — write poetry or read, perhaps. — to disconnect; to release, once and for all the tension that holds us captive.

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