Books Are Burning by Rubén Torres Llorca

Aluna Art Foundation presents Rubén Torres Llorca (b. Cuba, 1957)—one of the contemporary Cuban artists from the 1980s— for its solo exhibition in the Tower Art Space in Little Havana.

Torres Llorca’s entire body of work turns each element into a device for dismantling the rules of the game: those that uphold historical power, that govern the complex ties between art and collecting, that uphold the system (whether draped in the guise of communism or capitalism) or that underlie the suspect assumptions, at once intimate and collective, from which the imaginaries of love are shaped.

Books are Burning is a continuation of his larger body of work. As with Duchamp, Torres Llorca’s influences—with exceptions such as the spirit of Joseph Beuys, which hovers over his vision—spring primarily from the convergence of cinema and literature, although his act of plundering these sources never takes place through direct quotation or overt association, but rather through convergences that shift and allow for oblique interpretations and of the strategies of the apocryphal.

Torres Llorca builds his installation, Books are Burning (2025), as an evocation of the history of censorship—always unjustifiable and often ridiculous—of books, musical compositions, or films since the mid-20th century. Franco, for instance, banned the film Red and Black, based on Stendhal’s book, while in Cuba none of Borges' works circulated and Lezama Lima’s Paradiso was prohibited. Likewise, in Chile and Argentina, Julio Cortázar’s short stories were banned under the military dictatorships.

In many ways, Rubén Torres Llorca’s works open the door to the thought of gardens that fork, never homogenized, and to the upending of any form of censorship in the adult world. He leaves standing only one prohibition: that of refusing to see, to read, and to listen with a critical mind.

Aluna Art Foundation is located at 1444 SW 7 St, Miami Fl, 33135 Open by appointments, please call to visit the show: 786-587-7214.