“My main concern is for my work to become more defiant and disturbing, as I have made a conscious decision to work with sex aggressively—a topic that is the most complex in the world—to provoke a reaction from the viewer and make the spectator go inside himself to examine the hypocritical mentality about sex.” - Tomas Esson
Tomás Esson (born 1963), a Cuban artist of Jamaican descent now based in Miami, emerged as a provocative force in the 1980s Cuban art renaissance with bold, erotic paintings that fused surrealist caricature, political satire, and visceral sexuality to challenge revolutionary icons and societal hypocrisies, leading to censorship and his eventual defection in 1990. Evolving from figurative mythological hybrids to dynamic abstractions inspired by Afro-Caribbean diaspora, colonialism, and natural forms, his works draw on influences like Goya, and de Kooning, creating an intuitive visual language of gestural energy and cultural critique. Exhibiting internationally at venues like the Whitney Museum, ICA Miami, and Venice Biennale, with retrospectives highlighting series such as Miami Flow, Esson continues to bridge aesthetic traditions in collections worldwide, asserting the transformative power of myth and abstraction in confronting legacies of oppression.