Ghent-based artist Ricardo Brey (b. 1955, Havana), who was born in Cuba, has been working for several decades on a layered and varied oeuvre that offers a poetic and metaphysical reflection on our existence. Drawing on his mixed background, he combines a range of literary and scientific sources from Western thought and Afro-Cuban culture with more topical socio-economic references. He does this in a unique visual language for which he uses cheap or found materials as well as precious ones. This is also the case with the installation Saturno devorando a uno de sus hijos (2012). The work consists of a constellation of interlinked celestial bodies in the form of spheres or hemispheres, executed in the widest range of materials. Certain spheres are made of lead – a material which in antiquity was associated with melancholy and the god Saturn – while for others he used an ostrich egg or an old football. The title of the work is a nod to Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son (1823). But it can equally be interpreted as a metaphor for the suffocating regime in Cuba, which the artist fled and, by extension, all forms of abuse of power.
