"What I tried to do was the same thing the Cuban government has done with Martí's image, only condensed, concentrated into a fixed span of time." - Reynier Leyva Novo
Reynier Leyva Novo (Havana, 1983) works from the premise that ideology leaves measurable residue. In El peso de la historia he devised software to compute the ink required to print the founding texts of totalitarian regimes, including the Cuban constitution and penal code, converting law into a quantity of matter. The practice moved from the document to the monument to the migrant body: Patria, muerte y azúcar at the 13th Havana Biennial in 2019, the effaced Martí of Lo que es, lo que ha sido in 2020, and Methuselah, a border-crossing digital avatar commissioned by El Museo del Barrio. He left Cuba in 2021 and works in Houston. Venice Biennale (2011, 2017), Shanghai Biennale, Aichi Triennale, Pommery Prize at the Armory Show (2022). Collections include the Hirshhorn, the Walker Art Center, MFAH, PAMM, and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana.