Cuban artist Alejandro Piñeiro Bello made headlines earlier this year when he became the first Cuban contemporary artist to join the prestigious roster of Pace Gallery. His work is a vivid alchemy of abstraction and empirical figuration, channeling the vibrant energies of the Caribbean’s nature and its people. Deeply rooted in his connection to Cuba, Piñeiro Bello uses painting as a powerful tool of cultural and humanistic resistance—a celebration of creation and life in defiance of the destruction and repression that have long afflicted his homeland.
Ahead of the whirlwind that was Miami Art Week, Observer visited Piñeiro Bello at his studio to dive into the genesis of his explosive canvases and explore how they intertwine with his personal story and the collective narrative of his country.
Situated in the Little Haiti neighborhood, his two-room studio buzzes with creative energy; a few days after our visit, he hosted a private reception with his new gallery there. The space itself is a rich tapestry of art, music and books—a reflection of the artist’s synesthetic process that seeks to distill and amplify the elemental forces of Caribbean culture.
Piñeiro Bello’s exuberant, expansive canvases occupy a wildering liminal space between abstraction and figuration. They emerge from a deeply psychological, emotive and spiritual engagement with reality, blending objective presences, memories, folklore, imagination and symbolic elements. “I’ve always played with a lot of things,” he says as we look at an earlier piece that leans more toward symbolic abstraction. “All those approaches came together at some point, in an organic blend of abstraction, figuration and symbolism.”
The fluid and ambiguous nature of Piñeiro Bello’s paintings can evoke the vibrant symbolism of Paul Gauguin and the Nabis. Like these artists, known for their exploration of dreamlike, mythical, and spiritual themes, he delves deeply into the emotional and psychological resonance of color. His work is similarly inspired by the unique energy of the landscapes he paints. In his case, the lush vegetation of his Cuban homeland, the lively rhythms of his people’s music and the radiance of the Caribbean light serve as fuel for his vibrant compositions. “I have such a strong connection to my Caribbean heritage and culture,” he tells Observer, “so I feed myself from the sun, from painting history, from my friends’ stories—all of this is part of my process.”
Piñeiro Bello describes his art-making process as a complete surrender to the energy he perceives, allowing it to flow onto the canvas through purely intuitive and unconscious gestures. “It’s more like a transfer, completely abstract automatism. It’s all about moments of connection and interconnection,” he explains.
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This surrender results in paintings that feel like living, breathing masses in continuous evolution and transformation. Piñeiro Bello’s visual universe appears to draw equally from science and spirituality, attempting to translate the perpetual flow of particles, energies and forces that form the essence of all beings. Within the swirling brushstrokes and effervescent layers of paint, forms and symbols emerge, disappearing and reappearing, teasing out multiple associations. His saturated tides of color oscillate and fluctuate into stripes and spirals, while intentional blank spots reveal the raw canvas beneath. These moments of openness allow the paintings to breathe, evoking the wind and air that move between the elements.
The result is a spontaneous choreography of painterly gestures, mark-making, and moments of erasure. This dense palimpsest of interwoven lived and imagined experiences translates onto the canvas as a symphony of energy, memory, and connection.
As we talk, the artist gestures toward an intriguing epigram on the wall—a brief poetic composition that encapsulates the precise sensations and memories he aims to evoke in a particular work. These fragments might arise from direct observation of nature, a photograph, a memory, a line from his reading or even the music playing in the background. Piñeiro Bello isolates and recombines these impressions on the wall, using them as a guide for his painting process.
For instance, one epigram reads “Tropicalia Extendida”—“Extended Tropics.” “Here I was thinking about Tropicalia and Mark Rothko abstractions,” he explains. “So you see, the space is divided into two levels on the horizon. Then, I wanted to connect it to a minimum Baroque expression.”
Nearby, a nearly completed large-format canvas dominates the wall, summarizing and amplifying these sensations and references. Through vibrant colors, dynamic forms and layered textures, the piece radiates a dual energy—explosive yet reflective, contemplative yet engaging. “All my works come from ideas, and I write them on the walls,” Piñeiro Bello explains. For him, painting is akin to visual poetry, where sensations are translated into colors and painterly gestures. “What is around me would give me an image,” he adds.
While the opulent waves of color and lush, sparkling tides of Piñeiro Bello’s paintings radiate the lively energy of the island, shadowy areas of darker tones and deeper blues quietly evoke its historical wounds and personal struggles. These shadows are steeped in the artist’s own experiences, reflecting the conflict that animates his work—a celebration of Cuba’s beauty intertwined with an irremediable longing for a homeland he cannot return to. “I came with 200 dollars in my pocket; I would have never thought I would be able to stay,” he recounts of his initial arrival in New York in his twenties.
A pivotal encounter with artist JR in Havana became instrumental to Piñeiro Bello’s journey. After their meeting, JR invited him to participate in a residency. What began as a three-month stay in New York with a few artist friends extended into something more enduring, thanks to a grant from The Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation. “There was a Cuban curator there who asked us if we would be able to do a show in two months,” Piñeiro Bello explains. “We immediately said yes. We didn’t have much to lose. So we brought some paintings from Cuba and made a few more in New York.” Those early efforts marked the beginning of his connections to the New York art scene, a back-and-forth journey that continued for three years until he moved to Los Angeles in 2017.
The pandemic brought an unexpected chance for Piñeiro Bello to return to Cuba, reconnecting with his mother, friends and the natural landscape that has long nourished his work. Now based in Miami, he still makes trips back to Cuba, navigating the conflicting emotions these visits stir. While he knows he could never live there again, Piñeiro Bello feels a sense of purpose in his current position—offering support to those still there while keeping alive the spirit and beauty of his homeland. Despite the painful distance, he figured out he could be much more helpful where he is now, supporting those still in Cuba and doing what he can to ensure the world never forgets Cuba’s enduring vibrancy.
“After all, what artists do is to organize the apparent chaos into a beautiful thing,” Piñeiro Bello says, a mantra that seems to echo through his work. His paintings seek out an inherent natural order within chaos, holding onto the hope that a new cycle of regeneration might one day heal and restore.
