The exhibition Converging Dialogues in Contemporary Art: Cernuda Arte Represented Artists presents a panorama of contemporary Cuban art made inside and outside the island. The show includes works by Giosvany Echevarría, Miguel Florido, Flora Fong, Lilian García-Roig, Danuel Méndez, and Jorge Luis Santos.

Giosvany Echevarría was born in the municipality of Viñales, Pinar del Río, Cuba, in 1971. His renditions celebrate the majestic beauty of the Viñales Valley, depicting its renowned mogotes (hillocks), rivers, streams, and palm trees. Breathtaking sceneries unfurl with an artful blend of placid atmospheric mood and meticulous brushstrokes and show the artist’s mastery of the fine art of hyperreal landscape painting.

Miguel Florido was born in San José de las Lajas, Havana, Cuba, in 1980. His paintings explore the magic of mundane objects, which carry the mark of time. Equally important in execution are his splendid and intricate meadow-landscape paintings, as illustrated in the work included in the exhibition. Graced with a sense of wonder and romance, they unfold into subjective narratives that blend hyperrealism and abstraction.

Flora Fong was born in Camagüey, Cuba, in 1949. Her work is at once local and universal in its exploration of national identity and syncretic culture. Fong incorporates elements of her Oriental heritage into her visual lexicon. The use of the black line in her compositions highlights her interest in expressing the aesthetic force of Chinese calligraphy, which she uses to outline the figures, flatten the picture plane, and fragment the central focal point in her renditions.

Lilian Garcia-Roig was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1966. She is a Plein-air landscape artist –the French expression for “in the open air” painting– and reflects in her canvases a passionate engagement with both the given visual terrain and the painting process. Her body of work essentially befogs the boundaries between abstraction and representation.

Danuel Méndez was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1989. Méndez’s work balances realism with impressionistic and abstract expressionist tendencies. The psychological character of his work can be seen in the eight paintings from the Obsessions series in which a suite of portraits is arranged like a strip of film, each dedicated to an emotional state, featured in the exhibition.

Jorge Luis Santos was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1973. A self-taught artist, he developed a neo-expressionist oeuvre, which combines abstraction, text, and figuration, influenced by his surrounding environment and found objects. He is particularly interested in the relationship between space and depth, presence and absence, the seen and unseen, as translated into layers of materials built up to create depth and movement in his canvases.