Revealing the city as a perpetual work-in-progress

VISUAL ART:Carlos Garaicoa's elaborate mini-cities are beautiful, dreamy and thought-provoking – but unsettling too, writes AIDAN DUNNE

Carlos Garaicoa

Mixed media works exploring the social fabric of cities.

Irish Museum of Modern Art, Royal Hospital, Kilmainham.

Until September 5th

Cuban artist Carlos Garaicoa’s exhibition at Imma is timely, though maybe not in a good way. His work encompasses many forms and materials, but it’s always about architecture and cities. For Garaicoa the city is perpetually a work-in-progress, perennially incomplete.

More, the buildings and spaces from which it’s made tell stories about the nature of the society that builds and rebuilds it. Narratives relating to history, ideology, power, wealth, poverty and more can be read in the physical fabric of the city. Once you see his show – and while it is very user friendly, it takes some time – you may well be prompted to think again about your surroundings, both in the immediate vicinity of Kilmainham and in the wider context of Dublin, post-boom.

Garaicoa was born in Havana in 1967. Given the insistently architectonic nature of his work, one might think that he is an architect turned artist, but he never trained in architecture.

Originally, as his CV has it, he studied engineering thermodynamics, then went on to do his military service, during which he worked as a draughtsman. After the army, he decided to study art, which he did, in Havana, graduating in 1994. While he does spend some of his time in Madrid now, he is also still based in Havana.

And Havana is at the heart of his approach to art, even though he's ventured much further afield since 1994, in terms of both subject matter and exhibitions. In the dilapidation of Havana, he saw layers of history and something more. "After the fall of European socialism," he explained in a 2003 interview with Holly Block for Bombmagazine, "many Cuban construction and architectonic projects were halted or abandoned.

“In Havana, as well as in other Cuban cities, idyllic and nostalgic ruins from the colonial and first republic periods coexist with the ruin of a frustrated political and social project.” As with Dublin now: “The issue is not the ruin of a luminous past but a present of incapacity . . . where ruins are proclaimed before they even get to exist. I call these ‘the Ruins of the Future’.” Garaicoa has applied his ideas about Havana in a broader context to, as he puts it: “The phenomenon of modernity is in its incompleteness and the correlating frustration and decay of 20th-century utopias and social dreams.”

All of this might sound very dry and theoretical and, it has to be said, there is a certain dry, didactic quality to Garaicoa's work, but there's something else as well, a feeling for imagery and a kind of poetic imagination that recalls the magic realist writers or, even more, Jorge Luis Borges. He also refers to the author of Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino.

One terrific piece of work, the sculpture No Way Out, made in 2002, is very Borgesian. It's a labyrinthine vision of a city at night, made from customised rice-paper lamps, interconnected and illuminated in a darkened space. While it is quite beautiful and dreamy, as the title implies there's also a hint of menace in the concentric, maze-like configuration of the buildings. The work seems to refer to Japan, and one thinks of Tokyo as the model of a contemporary megalopolis, but it could apply to almost any modern city.

An ominous note is even more clearly sounded in a 2008 sculpture, On How My Brazilian Library Feeds from Fragments of a Concrete Reality.Books and journals about Brazilian architecture and culture are interspersed with polished concrete blocks in stacks like tower blocks. Walk around to the rear of the stacks, look closely and you see that the blocks are studded with embedded bullets: a subtle but very effective image. Books, blocks and bullets are presented as a continuum. Perhaps Garaicoa is alluding to the way utopian schemes grounded in theory tend to translate into dystopian realities. The implication is there but so too is a level of ambiguity that allows the sculpture some breathing space, letting us consider it as an object in itself, open to various interpretations, rather than as an illustration of an idea.

Garaicoa is exceptionally good and inventive at constructing elaborate architectural models from unconventional materials, including wax, crystal, cardboard, and he seems to have a particular liking for books. My personal Library Grows up Together with My Political Principlesis a city built from books, architectural books of course, but really well done in a way that would appeal to any child.

One of the highlights of the exhibition is The Crown Jewels, made last year. Again presented in a darkened room, it features eight illuminated vitrines, each displaying a piece of intricate silver jewellery. The jewels, however, turn out to be tiny, detailed models of centres of state ideology and oppression. They include buildings used as prisons, for torture and as intelligence centres. As a Cuban artist, Garaicoa doesn't just go for the easy options: one of the little jewels is apparently the headquarters of the Cuban counter intelligence department. The Pentagon and the erstwhile headquarters of the East German secret police, the Stasi, also feature. The paradoxical thing, of course, is that the models are really nice little objects.

Garaicoa is analytical and critical in his approach to architectural theory and practice, seeing architectural reality as being, all too frequently, a hegemonic or totalitarian imposition rather than a democratic creation. But how are we to set about moving from one to the other? Are we simply doomed to live among “the Ruins of the Future”? That’s less clear in what he does, but then he’s not an architect. He has referred to “the rethinking of the urban environment as a necessity for human beings” as being a preoccupation.

And certainly, give his work some consideration and you will be encouraged to think about your own architectural environment, public and personal. That can only be good.