Bio
I was born in Havana, Cuba, and graduated in 2010 from the San Alejandro National Academy of Fine Arts. From my early years of training, my work was linked to painting and an interest in objects as carriers of memory, affection, and meaning.
In Cuba, I carried out projects including the exhibitions Cambio de lugar [Change of Place] and Inventario [Inventory]. In Cambio de lugar, I visited homes in my neighborhood in Havana looking for objects that their owners kept for their sentimental value, out of necessity, or simply for the possibility that they might one day be useful again. I translated them into painting through my own interpretation and subsequently incorporated the original objects into the exhibition space, creating an installation in which they appeared grouped on the walls, almost like small altars of everyday memory.
In 2012, I moved to the Dominican Republic. For several years, I continued painting intuitively, without the intention of building a specific narrative. Painting remained a necessity and a personal space for exploration.
At the same time, my work for over a decade at Louis Vuitton—and especially the years tied to visual merchandising—kept me in constant contact with the construction of imagery, objects, accessories, and the ways in which these intervene in our perception. Mannequin heads began to appear occasionally in my paintings, initially as a visual curiosity that I didn't yet know how to direct.
In recent years, I resumed my artistic practice in a more conscious and sustained way. Those heads began to acquire another meaning: they ceased to interest me solely as shapes and became a starting point for thinking about our relationship with what we incorporate into our appearance and our lives, as well as the expectation of transformation we place upon it.
My work has been part of group exhibitions and projects in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and the United States. One of my paintings was selected by Louis Vuitton for the opening of its Masaryk store in Mexico, where it was reproduced on a large scale in one of its display windows and later included in a publication by the maison. My work has also been featured in Aldaba magazine in the Dominican Republic.
Currently, my research revolves around identity, desire, perception, and the promise of change that we place on external elements: that which we possess, incorporate, or display with the expectation of modifying, in some way, how we see ourselves and how we are seen.
Curiously, after more than fifteen years, the object reappears in my questions. Not as a conclusion nor as a resolved territory, but as something I am beginning to observe anew. My work lies precisely there: in a process of search, experimentation, and discovery of the forms these questions may take.
Press and projects
Artist statement
My work stems from a concern with our need to project an expectation, a desire, or a possibility of change onto something external. I am interested in observing how we attribute to certain objects, signs, or elements the capacity to transform something within us: how we perceive ourselves, how we wish to be perceived, or even what we imagine we could become.
This relationship does not belong solely to the present. Since ancient times, human beings have incorporated stones, bones, feathers, metals, and other elements onto the body capable of signaling belonging, hierarchy, protection, or distinction. Objects change with every culture and era; what remains is the impulse to project onto them meanings and expectations that exceed their material condition. The object then ceases to be merely what it is, becoming also what we expect from it.
"I am interested in observing how we attribute to certain objects the capacity to transform something within us..."
Currently, I explore these questions primarily through the human figure. Heads in profile that evoke the mannequin or the display object, barely defined bodies, and anatomies traversed by stains and painterly gestures function as ambiguous territories between body, representation, and object. Accessories do not necessarily appear literally. At times, they are replaced by abstract forms, interruptions, or elements orbiting around the figure. I am less interested in depicting the object itself than in depicting what we project onto it.
In this way, the painting moves between recognizable areas and others that remain open or indeterminate. The figure allows me to speak of the individual; abstraction, of that which does not yet possess a precise shape: expectation, desire, projection. I do not seek to represent a fulfilled transformation, but rather to linger in the moment right before: when something external begins to contain, for us, the possibility of a change.
My practice is currently in a process of search. The object appears even more as a question than as a physical presence, and that open condition is part of the work. I am interested in exploring how far this relationship between body, object, and perception can extend, and why we continue to deposit certain possibilities of transformation outside of ourselves. Perhaps the question running through my work is not what objects can do for us, but what we need to believe they can do.
Feature in Aldaba magazine, Dominican Republic.
Feature in Revista Central, Mexico (The Rainbow Project – Louis Vuitton, Masaryk, 2020)
