These two pieces were exhibited at the fifth Biennial of Havana, in 1994, as part of the installation Sueño, Arte y Mercado, in which this artist duo grouped several works and objects together to allude to the tribulations of Cuban creators: the lack of resources, the need for international recognition, the dream of being featured in important art magazines, and of course the necessary and novel foreign collecting of contemporary Cuban art. This last phenomenon would begin with the collector Peter Ludwig, who, since 1990, acquired dozens of works of Cuban art, also giving visibility to the production of artists from the island through exhibitions at the Ludwig Forum in Aachen.

Two portraits were included in the installation, one of them of Ludwig and the one we see here of Wolfgang Becker (who was at that time the curator and director of the Ludwig Forum). Becker is portrayed against a background of the duo’s work Tradición y Contemporaneidad from 1989.

In Pan, the Ludwig Forum stars in the composition in full color, and the lighthouse of Havana projects a beam of light with a painter’s palette that shows the Instituto Superior de Arte and reads “NOVEDADES,” while on the side of the lighthouse there is a list of various art world roles. This collage summarizes the complex scenario of Cuban artists and the importance of the German institution at that time for their subsistence and recognition.

René Francisco and Eduardo Ponjuán worked as a duo for a decade beginning in 1986. Both artists, graduates of the Instituto Superior de Arte, took art as a critical platform to address the political, economic, and cultural conflicts in life during those years on the island.