“My interest is that people see all the texts as if they were images.”
Born in Havana in 1971, Ernesto Leal studied art in Cuba at the Vocational School of Visual Arts, at “Paulita Concepción” from 1983 to 1986, and at the National Art Academy San Alejandro from 1987 to 1990. His work uses a variety of media, from painting and drawing to installations, performance, photography, and video, each chosen to best express a particular idea. During the 1980s, he belonged to the Cuban art collective Arte Calle.
Through various visual media, Ernesto Leal has been exploring spoken language and written text for many years. He investigates how they are used, misused, appropriated, and subverted, comparing and contrasting the different evolution of the spoken language instead of the written. His work centers on the analysis of the social uses of language and images that become subversive when fragmented put back together and taken out of context. In this way, art becomes a path to knowledge, which instead of pointing to the object itself, centers on its dynamics, its random, mobile, and incomplete nature.
His work has been exhibited at LACMA; the 7th Istanbul Biennial; National Museum of Fine Arts, Havana, Cuba; the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, San Jose, Costa Rica; the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, New York; Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo, Badajoz, Spain; the University of Salamanca, Spain; Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City; the Museum of Fine Arts, Buenos Aires, Argentina; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Monterrey, Mexico; headquarters of the IFA, Germany; and the Havana Biennial organized by the Wifredo Lam Center for Contemporary Art.