The New Cubans - Sculpture
The New Cubans / Sculpture Preview
THE NEW CUBANS
PHOTOGRAPHIC SCULPTURES PREVIEW
As part of The New Cubans project, I am currently engaged in pushing photography beyond its ephemeral nature into the realm of sculpture. Over the past decade, photography has become increasingly omnipresent—circulated, consumed, and quickly forgotten in the endless scroll of digital culture. By transforming my images into sculptural form, I seek to resist this impermanence and invite a slower, more enduring engagement with both the work and its subjects.
In Cuba, public space is filled with monuments that commemorate revolutionary heroes, rendered in bronze or marble to embody permanence and collective memory. My sculptural practice echoes and subverts this tradition by elevating today’s young Cubans—individuals whose lives often unfold at the margins of convention, and who may soon leave the island forever. Their fleeting photographic likeness, captured in a fraction of a second, is translated into a durable presence that insists on their visibility.
At the same time, these works enter into dialogue with the classical Greco-Roman ideal of beauty: perfected bodies immortalized in marble, meant to embody universal ideals. By contrast, my subjects reflect contemporary, often subcultural visions of beauty—tattooed, pierced, and unapologetically individual. Their presence challenges inherited ideals while expanding the very notion of what is worthy of celebration in lasting form. In this sense, the sculptures both recall and transform the tradition of beauty in art, affirming a new generation whose difference itself becomes monumental.
These works in development will be presented for the first time at Zona Maco in Mexico City in early 2026 by Almanaque Gallery.
PHOTOGRAPHY AND EXHIBITIONS OVERVIEW
