Faced with an untitled work, the viewer — and the critic too — stumbles twice: first with the piece, then with the void the artist deliberately left on the label. «Untitled» is not an innocent absence. It is a decision, and like any decision in visual art, it invites interpretation. I have seen the formula repeated in provincial salons in Ciego de Ávila until it lost its rarity: wood carvings, assemblages, oils that arrive at the exhibition without a name, as if naming them were a task the artist preferred to delegate to the viewer.

The simplest explanation — and the one almost no one accepts as sufficient — is that titling takes effort. A painting is resolved in the studio, between brushes and colour decisions; the title demands another effort, closer to writing than to painting, and not all visual artists feel comfortable there. I know sculptors capable of spending weeks resolving a plane in recycled metal and falling silent when asked what to call the piece. It is not laziness. It is that naming forces one to fix a meaning, and some prefer not to close that door just yet.

There a second hypothesis appears, more interesting: «Untitled» as a deliberate strategy of openness. The name guides the gaze; it always does, so removing it returns to the viewer the responsibility of completing the work. I have heard several artists defend this renunciation almost with pride, as if titling were, at bottom, underestimating the audience.

It is wise to be somewhat wary of that generous reading, however. There is also the defensive variant: the artist who does not title because they fear the title will betray them. Social criticism slips into the work out of necessity, and in Cuba that weighs differently than elsewhere. «Untitled» can function as a tactical retreat. Naming a piece that causes discomfort is to sign the discomfort twice; leaving it untitled leaves the door ajar for the artist themselves, if necessary, to say later that they never meant that.

There is a third possibility, less dramatic, which has to do with the rhythm of production. An artist who exhibits frequently — and in the Avilanian scene several do — does not always arrive at the installation with time to think of a name for each new piece. «Untitled» then becomes a last-minute wildcard, a printing solution rather than an aesthetic statement. The gallery tends to read this as philosophy when sometimes it is just that the catalogue was closing that afternoon.

What seems certain to me, after seeing the formula repeated in so many exhibitions, is that probably several answers coexist in the same exhibition, even in the same artist depending on the day. A sculptor may leave unnamed the piece that most exposes them and confidently title the one they resolved as a purely technical exercise. The silence of the title is not uniform: its function changes according to what the work risks.

If anything, what the critic should do in the face of an «Untitled» is resist the temptation to fill that void with their own interpretation disguised as objectivity. The artist’s gesture — laziness, strategy, or simply printing urgency — deserves to be recorded for what it is: an open question that the reviewer does not have to answer in their place. Sometimes the silence explains itself.