Hander Lara owns an essentially deconstructive artistic strategy. His initial motivation is the barely honest character of the nutritional truths of contemporary societies and the ambivalent sense of cultural values that hold that moral ideal standard. Thus, he is defined as a mistrustful, skeptical and cynical being. His route is every day more related to the path of cultural studies, specifically channeled to the lack of center of the constituent stories and myths of the overall idea of the social good, order and happiness.
His procedure is an utter simulation and he uses images of all kinds of, sometimes by travestying their symbolic attire, some others times, by weakening it, even overriding it. He applies a very refined dialect that finds is its first rule of basic organization in the displacement of cultural features. It is as if he would work on the intellective dimension that holds each symbol, putting aside its uniqueness, while exposing its cracks, in order to expose the programmed and artificial nature of civilized existence. He hosts the doubt in the body of the reason, in other words.
On the other hand, he is a delicate aesthetician who prioritizes the formal dimension of his work, while being aware of the needs of speaking in already common communicative terms to attract the attention of human reason. He uses previously manipulated photographs where he shows the glimpses of an installation practice that tends to decor; besides, painting is a declared sign of their empowerment and simulation as privileged formats.
His presence in the context of contemporary Cuban is part of the conceptualist tradition which holds Cuban artistic praxis and education since the nineties of the last century, as well as its redirection in concrete ways of poststructuralist analysis of the social entity in the historical present. But his election was not the orthodox practice of conceptualism, but the foundation of a Cuban version of pop art, which follows a local and international tradition, settled in very particular stratagems and tricks: his is a very fresh, sharp, and necessary look. The conclusions of his artistic trials are very particular, away from the ode to the sea and salt, sauce and stoicism. His images are decidedly apolitical, the future of this society is meant to be non-apologetic. Hander Lara is a sort of Cuban Warhol, an ill-fated wicked man.
