NADA New York 2025

Javier Orfon’s Cueva invisible, part of his Isla invisible drawing series, deploys calligraphy to trace the landscape surrounding an imagined cave landscape. His invisible cave is grounded in reality through the calligraphic naming of specific places, flora, and fauna in the Puerto Rican archipelago, combining proper names that specify entities and common names based on the normal language of everyday life. A nod to Esteban Valdés, a Puerto Rican poet who worked at the intersection of art, literature, and poetry of the 1970s, Orfon’s Cueva invisible recites a concrete poem that occupies a place in the physical reality of the interlocutor.