Novo works from the premise that ideology leaves residue, and that the residue can be extracted, weighed, and set in front of a viewer as an object. The method found its clearest form in El peso de la historia (The Weight of History), for which he built INk, software that computes the weight, volume, and surface area of the ink used to print a given document, converting historically loaded texts into abstract quantities. The series took as its material the ideological texts underpinning five twentieth-century totalitarian regimes, Cuba among them, and extended to books whose pages carry the exact measure of black ink required to write portions of the Cuban constitution, including the penal code, issued with the calculating software itself. The results are spare, close to minimalist sculpture, and they carry a charge out of all proportion to their means. Nothing is depicted. A law is simply reduced to the amount of matter it took to impose it.
The practice widened from the document to the monument and then to the body in transit. Patria, muerte y azúcar, presented in his own house during the 13th Havana Biennial in 2019 rather than in an official venue, came out of his research into the transatlantic slave system and the colonial enterprises that ran it. Lo que es, lo que ha sido (2020) buried a Sicre bust of José Martí under hundreds of coats of white paint, compressing into a month what the state performs by ritual across a century, and supplied the title of his last exhibition in Cuba. He is a member of the 27N artists' movement, and left the island in 2021 for Houston. Exile sharpened rather than softened the work. Methuselah (2021 to 2022), commissioned by El Museo del Barrio, reproduced a monarch butterfly's transnational migration as a live digital avatar governed by real weather and terrain, an organism that crosses borders without papers; Sauna Truck, shown in The Sunset Road at Artpace San Antonio, answered the migrants abandoned in a trailer outside that city in 2022; and the Mnemosyne's Whisper paintings conceal toppled monuments beneath accumulated color.
He trained at San Alejandro and the Instituto Superior de Arte, passing in 2007 through the Department of Behavior Art directed by Tania Bruguera, which accounts for the research discipline and the appetite for systems that has governed everything since. He has shown at the Venice Biennale in 2011 and 2017, the Shanghai Biennale, the Aichi Triennale, the FotoFest Biennial, and the Havana Biennial, and took the Pommery Prize at the Armory Show in 2022 for What it is, what it has been. He was named a Smithsonian Institution Artist Research Fellow at the Hirshhorn and the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the Blaffer Art Museum gave him a solo presentation, Former Present Today, in 2024, built on public monuments and the commemoration of authoritarian figures. His work is held by the Hirshhorn, the Walker Art Center, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Columbus Museum of Art, and Kadist, along with the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Bronx Museum, CIFO, and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana. The ink, the paint, and the butterfly measure one thing between them, which is the cost of making a version of history official.