Kcho (Alexis Leyva)
13 x 17 x 5 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
Joan Guaita Art Gallery, Palma de Mallorca, Spain