Cuban artist Alejandro Piñeiro Bello made headlines earlier this year when he became the first Cuban contemporary artist to join the prestigious Pace Gallery. His work is a vivid alchemy of abstraction and empirical imagery, channeling the vibrant energy of Caribbean nature and its people. Deeply rooted in his connection to Cuba, Pinheiro Bello used painting as a powerful tool of cultural and humanistic resistance – celebrating creation and life and resisting the destruction and repression that had long plagued his homeland.
Ahead of the whirlwind Miami Art Week, The Observer visited Piñeiro Bello in his studio to delve into the origins of his explosive canvases and explore how they intertwine with his personal story and the nation’s collective narrative.
His two-room studio in the Little Haiti neighborhood is bursting with creativity. A few days after our visit, he hosted a private reception there with his new gallery. The space itself is a rich tapestry of art, music, and books—reflecting the synesthetic process of artists seeking to refine and amplify the fundamental forces of Caribbean culture.
Piñeiro Bello’s vibrant, sweeping canvases occupy the broad line between abstraction and figuration. They arise from a deep psychological, emotional and spiritual contact with reality, incorporating elements of objective existence, memory, folklore, imagination and symbolism. “I’ve always played with a lot of things,” he says when we look at early works that lean more toward symbolic abstraction. “All these approaches came together at some point and became an organic fusion of abstraction, figuration and symbolism.”
The fluidity and ambiguity of Piñeiro Bello’s paintings can evoke the vibrant symbolism of Paul Gauguin and the Nabis. Like these artists known for exploring dreamy, mythological and spiritual themes, he delves into the emotional and psychological resonance of color. His work is equally inspired by the unique energy of the landscapes he paints. For him, the lush vegetation of his Cuban homeland, the lively rhythms of the people’s music, and the glow of the Caribbean Sea provide the impetus for his vibrant compositions. “I have such a strong connection to my Caribbean heritage and culture,” he told the Observer, “so I feed myself off of the sun, the history of painting, the stories of my friends – all of which are part of my process.”
Piñeiro Bello describes his artistic process as completely surrendering to the energy he senses, allowing it to flow onto the canvas through pure intuition and unconscious gestures. “It’s more of a transfer, completely abstract automation. It’s all about connections and interconnected moments,” he explains.
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The result of this surrender is that the paintings feel like a living, breathing community, constantly evolving and transforming. Piñeiro Bello’s visual universe seems to draw inspiration equally from science and spirituality, seeking to transform the eternal flow of particles, energy and forces that make up the essence of all existence. In swirling brushstrokes and boiling layers of paint, forms and symbols appear, disappear and reappear, teasing out multiple connections. His saturated waves of color oscillate and ripple into streaks and spirals, while intentional blank spots reveal the raw canvas beneath. These open moments allow the painting to breathe, evoking the wind and air that move between the elements.
The result is a spontaneous orchestration of painterly gestures, marks and moments of erasure. This dense palimpsest of intertwined lived and imagined experiences is transformed on canvas into a symphony of energy, memory and connection.
As we talked, the artist pointed to an interesting aphorism on the wall—a short poetic composition that encapsulates the precise feelings and memories he wanted to evoke in a particular piece. These fragments may come from direct observation of nature, a photograph, a memory, a line from his reading, or even music playing in the background. Piñeiro Bello separated and reassembled these impressions on the walls, using them as a guide for his painting process.
For example, one aphorism reads: “tropical extension”— “Expanding the Tropics.” “Here I’m thinking about Tropicalia and the abstraction of Mark Rothko,” he explains. “So you see, the space is divided into two levels on the horizon. Then, I wanted to connect this with a minimal baroque expression.
Nearby, a large, almost finished canvas dominates the wall, summarizing and amplifying these feelings and references. Through vibrant colours, dynamic forms and layered textures, the work exudes a dual energy – explosive yet reflective, contemplative yet engaging. “All my works come from ideas, which I write on the wall,” explains Pinheiro Bello. For him, painting is akin to visual poetry, where feelings are translated into colors and painterly gestures. “The things around me give me an image,” he added.
The gorgeous waves of color and lush, shimmering tides in Piñeiro Bello’s paintings exude the island’s vibrant energy, while dark tones and shadowed areas of deep blue quietly evoke its historical trauma and personal struggles. These shadows are steeped in the artist’s own experience and reflect the dynamic conflict that characterizes his work – a celebration of Cuba’s beauty intertwined with an irrevocable longing for a homeland to which he cannot return. “I came with $200 in my pocket; I never thought I could stay,” he recalls of his first arrival in New York in his twenties.
A pivotal encounter with the artist JR in Havana played an important role in Piñeiro Bello’s journey. After meeting, JR invited him to participate in the village residency program. What began as a three-month stay in New York with a few artist friends became more permanent thanks to a grant from the Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation. “There was a Cuban curator there who asked us if we could have an exhibition in two months,” explains Pinheiro Bello. “We said yes immediately. We had nothing to lose. So we brought some paintings from Cuba and created some more in New York. These early efforts marked the beginning of his relationship with the New York art world, a back-and-forth that The journey lasted three years until he moved to Los Angeles in 2017.
The pandemic presented an unexpected opportunity for Pinheiro Bello to return to Cuba and reconnect with his mother, friends, and the natural landscape that had long nourished his work. Now he lives in Miami, but he still returns to Cuba to deal with the conflicts those visits stirred up. While Pinheiro Bello knows he will never live there again, he feels a sense of calling in his current position—to support those who are still there while maintaining the spirit and beauty of his homeland. Although the distance is painful, he finds that he can now do more to help those still in Cuba and do what he can to ensure that the world never forgets Cuba’s enduring vitality.
“After all, what an artist does is organize apparent chaos into something beautiful,” said Pinheiro Bello, a quote that seems to echo in his work. His paintings search for an inherent natural order within chaos and hold out hope that new cycles of regeneration may one day lead to healing and restoration.
