NEW YORK, NY.- Alejandro Pi馿iro Bello (b. 1990, Havana, Cuba) paints the sociocultural mystic splendour of Caribbean culture with a focus on the Caribbean diaspora, Cuba, and the surrounding island nations’ identities, and histories. This fall, Pace’s gallery in London will stage the largest exhibition to date—and first in the UK—of works by Miami based-Pi馿iro Bello, running from September 3 to 28, 2024. Pace’s representation and work on behalf of the artist will be pursued in collaboration with KDR, Miami.

Pi馿iro Bello’s practice is deeply informed by the emotional and sensory experience of his life between Havana and Miami. Using traditional materials, such as oil on raw linen or burlap, he creates striking dialogues between the deep beige of the canvas and an iridescent palette of jade greens, oranges, purples, and teals. Chromatic interplay in Pi馿iro Bello’s work fortifies essential compositional structures, which often appear to revolve around an unseen centre point. In these images, his loosely handled paint forms endless landscapes that travel from dreamlike figuration to pure abstraction. Drawing inspiration from dreams and memories, Pi馿iro Bello’s paintings describe fleeting, timeless feeling.

While Pi馿iro Bello shares a visual language with his predecessors such as Wifredo Lam and Manuel Mendive, his work also stylistically references painters such as Paul Gauguin, Hokusai, Vincent Van Gogh, Edvard Munch, and Wassily Kandinsky. Pi馿iro Bello honed his skills as an artist at The National Academy of Fine Arts San Alejandro, Havana, Cuba (2006–2010). He was awarded grants from The Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation, New York and The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, New York in collaboration with Pioneer Works, New York. Pi馿iro Bello was a resident at the Vermont Studio Center in 2022. His works are held in public collections such as The Rubell Museum, Miami; Marquez Art Projects, Miami; NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale; The Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea; The Amorepacific Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea; The Brownstone Foundation Collection, Paris; The Chrysler Museum, Virginia; and the Museum of Latin American Art, Los Angeles.

Titled Entre El D韆 Y La Noche (Between Day and Night), Pi馿iro Bello’s exhibition this September will feature new paintings, works on paper, and a sculpture that symbolically and formally explore cyclical journeys through time, and within the self. The paintings on view in London take their inspiration from the atmospheric and emotional changes throughout a Cuban night and day.

The scale of works in Entre El D韆 Y La Noche represent some of the artist’s most ambitious to date, the largest of which spans over six meters. In these paintings, Pi馿iro Bello employs the structural qualities of classical Western art history while upending expectations of the landscape through his alchemical use of colour and non-linear storytelling. Reflecting the island’s rich intercultural heritage, Pi馿iro Bello’s practice is equally informed by the fiction, poetry, and music of his birthplace. Just as in the literary genre of Real y Maravilloso (Marvelous Real), these paintings depict the fantastic through an amplification—rather than transcendence—of perceived reality. Inhered in the layers of Pi馿iro Bello’s compositions lie the metamorphic, expressive juxtapositions of Latin America.