José Manuel Mesías was born in 1990 in Havana, Cuba, during the early years of the Special Period. He graduated from the National Academy of Fine Arts San Alejandro in 2009, where he specialized in sculpture, though painting has remained a constant and vital thread throughout his career. He lives and works in Havana, drawing inspiration from the island’s layered histories, urban landscapes, and the resilience of daily life.
At the core of Mesías’s practice lies a profound fascination with memory, appropriation, and the reactivation of history. He approaches Cuban history not as a fixed record but as a field of tensions between documented events and imagined possibilities, between official discourse and silenced voices. His multidisciplinary works often incorporate found objects, discarded materials, and fragments of everyday life — shoes, playing cards, taxidermy elements, glass shards, or architectural remnants — which he reconfigures into sculptures, installations, and painted compositions. These pieces function as cabinets of curiosities that bridge the natural and the artificial, the poetic and the pedestrian, creating dreamlike atmospheres where myth, alchemy, and critical reflection converge.
Mesías’s painting stands out for its technical mastery and conceptual depth, engaging with traditions from classical realism to surrealism while questioning how images are read in an age saturated by digital visuals. Series such as Índice de Imágenes, Rectifications to the Work of Armando Menocal, and explorations around figures like Antonio Maceo or Carlos Manuel de Céspedes reexamine historical episodes through personal and poetic lenses. His installations frequently transform collected residues into contemplative environments that speak of impermanence, entropy, and the quiet dignity of provisional existence.
He has participated in residencies in Japan (Akita Art Institute, 2018), Spain (Azkuna Zentroa, Bilbao, 2017), Colombia, Dubai, and elsewhere, experiences that have enriched his dialogue with international contexts while keeping his practice firmly anchored in Cuban realities. Solo exhibitions include Sala del Tiempo at the 13th Havana Biennial (2019), Verses and Theorems in New York (2019), Índice de Imágenes at Factoría Habana (2017), and About Absolute Truth at Mindy Solomon Gallery in Miami (2016), among others. His work has been featured in major group exhibitions at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana, Galleria Continua, El Espacio 23 in Miami, and international venues in Europe, Asia, and Latin America.
Through a language that is at once meticulous and intuitive, José Manuel Mesías maps the invisible territories between history and memory, residue and revelation, offering a subtle yet powerful meditation on Cuban identity and the enduring poetry of the everyday.