In the mirror

Curated by Ilaria Bignotti and Camilla Remondina

In collaboration with the Municipality of Brescia

The first solo exhibition of Abel Herrero (La Habana, 1971) in the city of Brescia is hosted at MO.CA – Center for New Cultures, a space devoted to the experimentation of contemporary languages and to the encounter between artistic practices emerging from diverse cultural geographies. Within this context, attentive to the complexities of the present, In the Mirror takes shape as a visual and conceptual device that invites the public to measure themselves against their own time through the prism of figuration.

Herrero, a Cuban artist who has long explored the ethical and political drifts of contemporaneity, weaves into his works the dimension of the visual arts together with references to philosophy and literature. His practice often assumes a monumental and environmental scale, where the image becomes a site of interrogation and, simultaneously, of denunciation.

In the Neoclassical Rooms, the artist constructs an essential yet powerful pathway: a small number of large-format paintings, conceived specifically for the exhibition, emerge as silent epiphanies. On these previously unseen canvases—dominated by animal physiognomies—the gaze of the viewer is called to engage in a play of ethical and moral reflections. The portrait, a central genre in Herrero’s practice, becomes here both mirror and threshold, a place in which to become aware of the ambiguities, latent violences, and contradictions of our time.

The exhibition design takes on the form of a suspended theatrical scene: visitors are invited to cross an environment in which the image reveals itself, compelling them to lift the curtain that often conceals collective hypocrisies, fears, and acts of forgetting. The unsettling force of the face—human or non-human—thus becomes a critical passage through which to question the forms of freedom, repression, and vulnerability.

In the Mirror aligns with a coherent trajectory within Herrero’s artistic research, one that finds a key precedent in the exhibition Removed (Havana, 2017), accompanied by critical texts by Demetrio Paparoni and Eugenio Viola. In that project, the artist brought back into visibility, through monumental painted portraits, the figures of Russian poets and intellectuals annihilated by Stalinism: an act of rewriting memory carried out in post-Soviet Cuba, against decades of silence and censorship.

In Brescia, Herrero renews this dialogue between face and conscience, but transports it to a more radically anthropological terrain. The paintings reveal presences that probe the thin threshold between human and non-human, summoning the viewer into a relationship of reciprocal gazes and recognitions. It is within this interstice that the exhibition’s challenge unfolds: to invite us to look —and to look at ourselves— through a surface that reflects our fragilities, our responsibilities, and the shadows of the time we inhabit.