I have a couple of friends named Ramses. I met them in Cuba, and both ended up in Spain. I’m not sure if they are still there, probably. But what continues to strike me is not the trajectory. How is it that I have two friends with the name of a pharaoh? How is this possible?
I tend to think it has to do with Ramses II—the pharaoh who ruled Pi-Ramesses (Nile Delta) between 1279 and 1213 BC. Western civilization had little awareness of his existence until the early seventeenth century.

According to multiple sources, Art Attack Cincinnati emerges in the early 2020s, within a broader moment of cultural reactivation following the pandemic. It can be understood as a punctual exhibition format that enables the direct sale of artworks. It has no fixed venue and unfolds across informal sites in the city, with recurring presence in places such as Braxton Brewing Co. Cincinnati.

Presented by The Annex Gallery, The Body Isn’t a Battery That Discharges Upon Death unfolds as an exploration of what time gradually dissipates—traces and residues—and of what still resists, its resonances.
The brochure—printed austerely in black and white on tinted stock—sets out, with clarity, the exhibition’s aesthetic and conceptual framework...

Rigoberto Mena is an artist with a solid career spanning more than three decades. I consider him the most important Cuban abstract artist working today, and I am not willing, in the presence of such a figure, to write a definitive text without having this exhibition before me. Above all because this is not just another show. Here, as in a previous one held in North Carolina, something has shifted in ways that matter.