Manuel Comas Labrada, with impeccable academic training, began his art studies at the Escuela Elemental de Artes Plásticas in 1975, graduating in 1978. He continued at the Academia de San Alejandro from 1978 to 1982 and ultimately completed his higher education at the Instituto Superior de Arte, specializing in Painting, in 1987. From 1985 to the mid-1990s, he worked on various projects, including murals, billboards, posters, books, and designs alongside the renowned Cuban artist Raúl Martínez. Later, he actively participated in various social projects, donating works for humanitarian auctions.
His pictorial work is characterized by two main aspects: eroticism and abstraction. In both, he left a highly personal mark that defines him among many other creators of his generation. In abstraction, the developed series feature both an intense use of color in some cases, and metallic, steel-like, and cold tones in others. Generally, his painting is primarily material-based.
After relocating to Miami, he continued working actively. When the malignant illness emerged, he fought a tenacious battle for his precious life, with the loving support of his devoted wife, who cared for him diligently, alongside family, friends, and healthcare institutions, until he lost the battle last year. Honoring his memory and revisiting the visuality of his wonderful creations is a way of paying a debt to an artist of singular trajectory, with a magnificent body of work, and a beloved individual.
Galleries and art institutions organized numerous solo exhibitions for him, both in his native country and in Spain. He participated in more than 30 group exhibitions in Cuba, Mexico, Nicaragua, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In the 1980s, he earned numerous awards and recognitions, both in painting and drawing. His works form part of various private collections in Cuba, the United States, Mexico, Spain, Portugal, France, and the Dominican Republic.
RUBÉN RODRÍGUEZ
Ruben Rodriguez (b. 1959 in Cardenas, Cuba) graduated from the National School of Arts (ENA, Havana) in 1980. From 1998 until 2001, he was a Professor of Serigraphy at the Higher Institute of Art (ISA, Havana). Rodriguez's body of work is defined by a fundamental interest in the lines that define not only our bodies in their complex hybridizations but also the context and the current circumstances in which we live. Their emotionally charged vibrancy conveys the artist's personal archive of desires, memories, and obsessions linked to the notion of destiny in its unpredictable and finite cycle. His work is enigmatic in its simplicity and high level of suggestion, evoking deep ontological questions related to the human condition and its permanent struggle with loneliness and sexuality. Ruben Rodriguez is represented in the collections of The Joan Miro Foundation (Spain), National Museum of Fine Art, Havana (Cuba), Luly Duke Foundation Amistad, New York, Museum of Modern Art, Johannesburg (South Africa), Museum of Modern Art (Peru).
CARLOS LLANES
Carlos Llanes (b. Melena del Sur, Cuba, 1956), an architect of abstract forms, turns the universe of the indeterminate into unobstructed compositions; his works are physical metaphors of conflicting forces, of intricate struggles between opposites that emerge in harmony towards the surface of the canvas, a balance that only manifests itself through the intricate reciprocity between the beholder's eye and the painter's hand conducting rhythmically through a soothing flood of perceptual stimuli.
'In the superimpositions of layers of color, in the broad strokes or drips that create volumetric effects, and in the accumulation of pigment that loads an area of the painting with reliefs that make the beholder's eye descend towards another room. Thus, these abstract Carlos Llanes canvases also generate a perceptual ambivalence between the urge to revel in the pure pictorial matter and its inexhaustible sensory effects and the tendency to transform these paintings with our perception into incredible rural landscapes. Two different fractions delineate the compositional structures of these pieces: At first, Carlos begins to concentrate pictorial matter in the lower plane of the painting; this telluric congestion of color then gives way to a higher plane, dominated by foggy whites and grays as if it were the horizon of a mystical twilight whose mists seem to descend on fiery mountains and hills in an apotheosis of the most rebellious and immeasurable nature.'
By Hamlet Fernández, Art Critic and Professor (University of Havana)
This exhibition is made possible thanks to the support of the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, the Cultural Affairs Council, the Mayor, and the Miami-Dade County Board of County Commissioners.
The Kendall Art Cultural Center (KACC), dedicated the past six years to the preservation and promotion of contemporary art and artists, and to the exchange of art and ideas throughout Miami and South Florida, as well as abroad. Through an energetic calendar of exhibitions, programs, and its collections, KACC provides an international platform for the work of established and emerging artists, advancing public appreciation and understanding of contemporary art.
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The Rodríguez collection is a blueprint of Cuban art and its diaspora. Within the context of the new MoCA-Americas the collection becomes an invaluable visual source for Diaspora identity. It represents a different approach to art history to try to better understand where we come from to better know where we are heading.
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