Kcho (Alexis Leyva)
18.1 x 50.2 cm
Bote is one of the most concise and devastating statements in his entire oeuvre. A small, coffin-like boat cast in dark bronze sits like a relic, its interior brutally interrupted by a single, gleaming pewter bone that spans the full length of the hull — functioning simultaneously as oar, thwart, and corpse. The bone, rendered with anatomical precision, transforms the modest vessel into a floating ossuary, where the dream of escape is already occupied by death.
Created in the mid-1990s amid the height of the balsero crisis, the work collapses the distance between the means of survival and its inevitable outcome. The elegant, hand-hewn form of the boat retains its seductive promise of mobility, yet its core has been claimed by the irreducible human remainder — the skeletal evidence of those who did not reach the other shore. In Kcho’s hands, the humble *bote* becomes both lifeline and tombstone: the last object a migrant will ever need, and the only one that will certainly accompany him.
This is Kcho at his most surgically poetic — turning a functional object of desperation into a quiet, forensic monument to the fatal cost of Cuban departure. "Bote" does not romanticize the raft; it reveals it for what it truly is: a vessel that carries hope and death in perfect, inseparable equilibrium.
Exhibitions
“Kcho,” Galería Joan Guaita Art, Palma de Mallorca, Spain, 2001.
Literature
Provenance
Estudio, KCHO > Joan Guaita Art Gallery, Palma de Mallorca, Spain