ABOUT MY VISUAL AND MUSICAL ART

Ever since childhood, I have always been a storyteller. I used to love   making up stories and shaping them inside my mind. Usually, this would happen   whenever I listened to a symphony or a musical piece by great composers. That   may be why my work sounds like one (or many) of those stories I invented as a   child. The difference lies in the fact that this story has a biographic   quality. My work is an empathic text where all the discursive components and   language (painting, music, and video) become a tangible, factual body. It is an unfolding story, growing, self-questioning, searching, and questioning. It   couldn't be any other way since, as in life itself, it takes place in an   accurate and vital time, that is to say: in my own time. 

Thus, many codes and/or symbols refer to my childhood, to the   experiences of my entire life. Traumas, fears, and attachments to adult   identity are what I am talking about. Any code, any symbol system, in the   context of my work, must be explored by the audience, read by the audience, and   interpreted - in its way - by another. I take characters used throughout   history, but I bring them into my context, readjusting their meanings and   warning of other possible interpretations. 

My entire body of work seeks to respond to questions and queries, be they   philosophical/theological, which, after all, are fundamental in my life and   play a significant role in my understanding of my existence and the world surrounding   me. As I mentioned before, Adam and Eve, man, fruit, and machinery, symbolize   or refer to aspects of my life or experiences that I lived in Cuba until the   age of 36, along with other processes undergone in the complex process of   adjusting to a different culture such as that of the United States. 

I have chosen to develop my work through clever use of parables and   the resources of tropology. I grew up in a Comic Book generation. Pop art had   an extremely relevant role, taking comics to the big galleries. Hence, in my   work, I recount my story through a parable (fable), in which I seek to convey   the morals resulting from my personal, and therefore non-transferable,   experiences. In many aspects, the audience must scrutinize the entire work to   "find" the meaning and give possible structure to the story. 

That may be why my work may be organized in series, in stages, in eras   (imaginary and Lezamian). Pictorial form may vary depending on the drama or   emphasis. Music, I compose for my painting turns into an independent space of   sound. This explains the dialectic relationship between the two; one is a consequence   of the other. Viewing my art as an element isolated from my music, is, in   fact, a mutilation, insofar as the sound-plastic intent is lost. 

Similarly, video is the most favorable environment to experience this   symbiosis, this synergy, this relationship. Not losing sight of the fact that   my artistic work reflects what I did in my adolescence and in my childhood   when I listened to music. When I first saw Cornelius Cardew's graphic scores,   it was a revelation. It was a turning point, that marked a before and after.   During my early formative years, my art philosophy professor, Juan Enrique   Guerrero, urged me to expand my creativity by composing music to my   paintings. That is how this restlessness began, which turned into a work   methodology. Nevertheless, I didn't know how to bring this concept to   reality, as painting and composing don't operate on the same sensorial levels   and in practice there are divergences in how they can be felt. I discovered   with the music scores of Cornelius Cardew, a moment that until that time had only   worked in theory for me. I could then put it into practice. It was then that   I understood the direct relationship between the sound that an artist   experiences and his vision. As a result, my painting is the visual expression   to my music and my music is the sound space to my painting.