Sergio H. Payarés Rivero (Havana, 1962) belongs to the generation of Cuban artists who transformed the country’s painting at the close of the twentieth century. Trained within the rigorous academic tradition of Cuban art, his early career was shaped by his work at the “René Portocarrero” Screen Printing Workshop, where he mastered the craft with a sensitivity he would later expand toward conceptual experimentation. His trajectory, extending from Havana to Miami, traces the map of an inner search that engages with exile, identity, and the need to construct meaning across dispersed territories.
Payarés’s work is defined by formal restraint that becomes, at once, a poetic gesture. On his canvases, white or gray backgrounds form atmospheres of silence in which fragments of the human body—heads, hands, legs—float as signs. These figures, rendered with near-calligraphic precision, do not describe tangible bodies but symbolic presences, suspended within a tension of invisible forces. The lines that connect them—sometimes networks, sometimes boundaries—serve as metaphors for the bonds that sustain human beings, for the persistent attempt at communication that traverses time and distance.
Through this economy of means and density of meaning, his painting acquires a metaphysical dimension. Space becomes a territory where memory, solitude, and desire converge. Payarés works with the minimum to suggest the essential: a line brushing another, a void that turns into a center, a suspended gesture that evokes the unattainable. His works invite contemplation—a quiet inner resonance completed by the attentive viewer.
In recent years, his production has been recognized in exhibitions of contemporary Cuban art across the Americas and Europe. From Miami galleries to Spanish institutions, his work has asserted itself as a singular voice within the Cuban artistic diaspora—a voice that, from the stillness of form, questions the human condition with lucid, almost ritual serenity.
This piece, from a private collection, is now on view in the exhibition Winter Selection, which will remain open through the end of the year.
Reina Protectora, 2004
Oil on Canvas | 54¼ x 43 in
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