CAMIBAart's "Ciudades" Present Cityscapes Extending to Infinity

From the Unstable Spaces series by Daniel Rodríguez Collazo

Remind yourself that these are not photographs you're looking at.

CAMIBAart, smack in the middle of yet another Austin strip mall, is an interior oasis of elegance that provides respite from the utilitarian, made environment near where Cameron Road intersects with Highway 290 in a flat darkflower blossom of asphalt and concrete.

Of course, the things you're looking at inside Camiba's intimate yet high-ceilinged gallery, the things you're looking at that are not photographs, they're also made things – but the environment they create is far removed from utilitarian. These things are the work of Daniel Rodríguez Collazo, a Cuban artist who honed his skills, with a focus on engraving, at Havana's Academia de Artes Plasticas Eduardo Abela. The exhibition program from Camiba tells us: "Collazo's impeccably detailed creations often straddle the line between photorealistic architectural documentation and surrealist futuristic visions. Working in a variety of mediums, including charcoal, graphite, acrylic, ink, drywall, and more, Daniel's artworks are consistently inspired by built urban landscapes."

And now this preview begins to seem infused with irony, doesn't it? Kind of how the concrete of traffic overpasses is infused with rebar to provide greater support? Because we're talking about how this "Ciudades" exhibition – how art itself – is a break from the mundane practicalities of mass housing and transportation, and yet these meticulous works by Collazo, arranged for best impact upon the gallery's walls, are representations of Just That Stuff. Next we'll be yammering about John Cage and his insistence that all sound (or even silence) is a form of music, depending on its context, and – no, let's not get synesthetically distracted here.

Remind yourself again that these are not photographs you're looking at.

They're part of the "Ciudades" exhibition that's formed of three distinct parts: Ciudades Infinitas (Infinite Cities), Espacios Inestables (Unstable Spaces), and Resonancias (Resonances). The labels hint at what will help you remember that these depictions aren't photographs: Collazo might superimpose one section of a structure over another, extend improbable edges toward some Brunelleschi vanishing point, work a sudden glitch of color into the monochrome matrix of his cityscapes. He'll wrench your mind from the drafting table's careful grid. Question: If parts of some shelterless sky are rendered along the rigorous lines of an apartment block, yet a trio of balconies are aglow in perfect blue ... well, who's to say heaven is other than where the inhabitants reside? And who wouldn't want a glimpse of that in their daily lives?

A brief anecdote: My Austin-born son returned from his first visit, as a teenager, to New York City – a metropolis I was passingly familiar with from my own youth. "Isn't it crazy how high the buildings go there?" I asked him. "All those skyscrapers, just going up, up, up?" He shook his head. "It wasn't so much that they went so high," he said, "It's that they went so high everywhere: The city just kept going and going."

And so it does. And Havana's no Big Apple. But the way Daniel Rodríguez Collazo captures that Cuban capital and what its architecture implies, it'll keep going and going inside your modern head, extending those improbable edges, for years to come.

"Daniel Rodríguez Collazo: Ciudades"