Artist Statement

In my recent body of work, I have been exploring the alchemical relationship between interiors, materiality, and abstraction. After decades of transforming rooms into camera obscuras and revealing the world in unexpected ways, I find myself drawn to a more visceral engagement with the surfaces and substance of the physical world.

These new abstractions emerge from a dialogue between architectural space and the fluid nature of paint. By manipulating pigment across various surfaces within domestic, historical and imagined interiors, I create a visual conversation between containment and expression. The paint—sometimes poured, sometimes brushed, often manipulated through unconventional means—responds to the inherent geometries of floors, walls, and furnishings, creating topographies of color that challenge our perception of familiar spaces.

What fascinates me is the tension between control and chance. As I introduce paint to these environments, I become both director and witness to its migration across surfaces. The resulting compositions document a moment of transformation where the structured logic of architecture meets the unpredictable flow of liquid medium. Light continues to play a crucial role in my practice, now activating these painted interventions in ways that blur the boundary between photography and painting.

I see these works as extensions of my longstanding investigation into how we perceive and inhabit space. Where my camera obscura images invited the outside world into interior spaces, these new abstractions reveal the hidden energies and possibilities that exist within our most familiar surroundings. They ask us to reconsider the boundaries between representation and abstraction, between documentation and creation.

These explorations reflect my continued fascination with transformation—how simple materials and everyday spaces can be reimagined to reveal unexpected beauty and complexity. In merging the languages of photography, painting, and installation, I seek to create images that are both grounded in physical reality and transcendent of it, offering new ways of seeing the environments we inhabit daily.

Notes on Recent Pictures

Interiors

I have always been drawn to pictures of interiors – as my ‘camera obscura’ body of work suggests. For my recent pictures of interiors, I am building small models as I continue to  explore ways to transform rooms pictorially. I believe this new work expands on my earlier interiors with the addition elements of theatrical and psychological intensity. With these new pictures I feel I am opening a wider portal to explore the unconscious in me.

Opera sets

I came late to an interest in opera; it is not something I knew anything about growing up in Cuba.  I love the drama and the music but often what captivates me most are the inventive and beautiful sets – the space.  Images I am making that spring from my curiosity about opera are visual inventions of imaginary theatrical worlds.

The Annunciation

A particularly Cuban form of Catholicism shaped my early life but I am not a believer now. Religious art, however, is another matter; I am drawn to images that attempt to capture elements of the mystical. So many great early paintings came about because of commissions by the Church. One of my favorite subjects, represented by many painters, is the moment when the Virgin Mary receives the news that she was pregnant with Jesus. There are countless great renditions of this subject. Fra Angelico painted several versions of the annunciation; the one from  1452 is my favorite. My very unscientific study of hundreds of Annunciation images reveals that most of them utilize a divided space, depicting two adjacent chambers. Almost always, the angel Gabriel occupies one side of the divided space and Mary is in another. It’s an elegant visual solution that helps to tell a complicated story.

To me, the architecture in “Annunciation” paintings also suggests a sort of crude camera, complete with rays of light from the heavens entering the discrete chamber that Mary occupies – a religious miracle envisioned visually in ways that harken the  primitive image making magic of the camera obscura.

For my recent picture inspired by this particular New Testament story, I kept things rudimentary so as to not be too literal but with the intention of showing  how light enters the space occupied by Mary, transforming it and her in the process.

Paint

I have been a photographer for a long time and I continue to love the medium of photography. Much of my pleasure comes from my ongoing interest in, and acceptance of, photography’s technical and digital evolutions. My new pictures would never see the light of day without the digital 150 MP camera I use now, which renders the world it points to in such vivid ways.

I don’t think it is a secret, though, that I have also had a romance with painting throughout all my life. I envy painters and what they can do. I am in no way a  painter but recently I began to use paint in my picture-making to amplify possibilities in color, space and meaning. My photographs of paint accept ways that photography can translate paint to give me something new.

My tent-camera work in France took me to the terrain that so many 19th century painters walked and worked in. The photographs I made with my tent flirt with the idea of marrying paint and photography, an idea that that I believe I am taking to deeper level now as I borrow and learn from painters in the interest of making a photograph that celebrates my love of both mediums of expression.

Painted Wooden Constructions

I discovered Piranesi while making pictures at the Boston Athenaeum using his large Roman architectural tomes in the early 1990’s. His illustrations of prisons were particularly intriguing to me because of the ways he combined structural design with a deep sense of dread. This artistic mix had a great effect on me.

My recent constructed wood constructions are not exactly dreadful but they do suggest an architecture of some disorder. In some of these pieces, I attempted to come up with worlds that have a Mondrian-ish order to them.

Color Geometry Abstractions

Abstraction in art is something that I am drawn to but it has not been a distinct part of my visual repertoire until recently. I love the geometric creations of  Mondrian, Frank Stella, Sol Lewitt, Bridget Riley and many others, so much that the idea of following on some of their great works felt forbidden to me. Recently I have been experimenting with my own way into this artistic genre to see if I had anything to say. To me, there is something satisfying and elemental about basic geometry - it feels ancient. In pursuing this new exploration into abstraction, I see something interesting starting to happen in my geometric pieces, for instance, how the pale shower-like strips surrounding the main color fields help to reveal my both process and the illusion of the image extending beyond its edges.