"I am interested in the moment a face begins to come apart, where you can still recognize a person but the person is already slipping away." - Yasiel Elizagaray
Yasiel Elizagaray (b. 1987, Sancti Spíritus, Cuba) paints the human face as it comes apart. Working in thick oil stick, he leaves contours open and lets features double and dissolve, so his portraits hover at a threshold where a person is still recognizable but already slipping toward the spectral. Trained far from Havana in Cuba's provincial art schools, he has built an expressionism of unease rather than likeness, most fully in his recent Liminal series. Named CFA Artist of the Year in 2019, he has shown across Europe, the United States, and Cuba, including at the Vatican's Palazzo della Cancelleria, and works from Havana.