At the heart of this exhibition lies a friendship. Not a trivial or merely anecdotal bond, but one that has endured for over two decades among artists who, though they do not necessarily share the same generation or trajectory, have cultivated an aesthetic and personal complicity. Tree of a Kind springs from that complicity. Its title—borrowed from a poker hand in which three different cards share the same value—serves as a structural metaphor for what is presented here: three distinct voices, each with markedly different visual languages, yet rooted in a shared cultural substratum and in the will to engage in dialogue through mutual respect and difference.

The exhibition does not seek to force a synthesis or construct a closed narrative. Rather, it proposes an open architecture in which each work retains its autonomy while gaining depth through proximity to the others. There are no hierarchies, no zones marked as an artist’s “exclusive territory”: the three share the exhibition space in a curatorial gesture that highlights crossings, frictions, and the potential resonance between divergent imaginaries.

What might seem, at first, a private gesture—coming together again after years, showing what each has been thinking, living, and painting—becomes here an act of collective responsibility. The exhibition marks not only an affective reunion but also a restitution of meaning: a way of showing how art can articulate memories, migrations, bonds, and fractures on the same surface. In this sense, Tree of a Kind is significant not only for the artists who shape it but also for the institution that hosts it—the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Americas—and for the broader artistic and cultural community around them.

Choosing to present it in this space, with which all three artists have been connected in the past, feels like a return home. But it is a transformed return, tempered by maturity and a consciousness of time’s passage. In that maturity the exhibition finds its tone, not as a nostalgic celebration but as an affirmation of what remains possible: encounter, shared creation, and the construction of meaning through diversity.

Julio Figueroa-Beltrán’s work stands out for being both contemplative and narrative. His paintings emerge from everyday life in the United States—a father and son in a kayak on the Gulf, Florida palms at dusk, Victorian houses in the South—yet they do not rest in the anecdotal. His imagery operates with symbolic layers that go beyond the visible. There is in his landscapes a deliberate misalignment, a subtle fracture in representational logic that turns them into dreamlike territories, sometimes bordering on surrealism but never submitting to it. They are possible worlds rather than real ones; emotional settings rather than geographic ones. Figueroa-Beltrán paints as one who traces an inner drift: a cartography of exile, memory, and longing. His work is, at its core, an ode to seeing: just for your eyes.

Elier Batista, in contrast, works through the critical appropriation of American visual icons. His American Landscape series draws on a pictorial tradition that seems familiar—flags, buffalo, coins—yet is shifted, rearticulated through the gaze of an immigrant who has turned that symbolic repertoire into a field of inquiry. His gesture is neither merely ironic nor parodic; it is a way of reconfiguring identity in transit. Batista does not copy the American landscape, he decodes it; he does not simply represent it, he rewrites it. His work converses with Pop Art, with artists such as Jasper Johns, but at a critical distance, infusing personal nuances that enrich his visual commentary with biographical depth.

Luis Abreu, meanwhile, positions himself in a more expressive, gestural realm. His painting—rich in materiality, with heavy impasto and oil—creates a link between drawing and painting that recalls certain impulses of Neo‑Expressionism. Yet his line also carries something playful, an irreverent irony that connects him to the tradition of graphic humor and visual satire. His compositions are direct, at times raw, intensely physical. In this exhibition, Abreu presents a series of works dominated by white, where spontaneous strokes seem to open toward intuition and the visceral without losing structure. His is a graphic energy that insists on communicating, on provoking, on leaving no one indifferent.

A balanced installation

On a formal level, the exhibition unfolds as an open constellation. There are no exclusive zones for each artist, but rather an interweaving that allows languages to intersect, subtle interferences to emerge, unexpected echoes to resonate. Visual quality and coherence of the whole take precedence over the logic of distribution. The larger works occupy the shared ground floor, while the smaller pieces inhabit the upper level. This layout, far from being a spatial constraint, has been embraced as a curatorial opportunity to amplify dialogue and highlight the affinities and tensions among the works.

What takes place in Tree of a Kind is not simply a group show. It is a conversation. A conversation among three friends who have chosen art as a way of life and thought. A conversation that opens to the viewer, inviting us to enter that complicity, to read between layers of color and symbol, to reconstruct—through the visual—the life paths that run through each canvas.