Cosas Ocultas grants its viewers a deeper look into social complexities and, steps away from the common schemes, folklore, and cultural stereotypes associated with Cuban culture.
"Untitled" from the series "Thriller" - Rocío Garcia
Rocío García
(b. 1955, Villa Clara, Cuba), a graduate of the esteemed Repin Academy of Art in St. Petersburg,surprises her audience with her imagery. Throughout her work, she illuminates the subterranean and repressed life, in particular homosexual and erotic subculture. Allowing the agonizing, hapless, prohibited, different, distressing, and confined by ignorance escape in her paintings, Rocío’s imagination takes the viewer into the underworld—inhabiting bars, bathrooms, brothels, cargo ships, circuses and billiard rooms are characters who embody the human struggle for power and repression: geishas, dominatrices, masochists, strippers, mutants, boxers, opium smokers, rapists, and outcasts.
"No Más" - Alberto Casado
Alberto Casado
(b. 1970, Havana, Cuba), a graduate from the Instituto Superior de Arte de La Habana, makes work heavily influenced by the folk art tradition that chronicles a more subversive Cuban daily landscape and the goings-on of his artistic circle. Using found materials—he brightly paints bus windows radiated by a foil backing—Casado incorporates a uniquely Cuban colloquial visual vocabulary including his own African heritage (he is a resident of the Afro-Cuban neighborhood—Guanabacoa in Havana) and bolita, the lottery game banned in Cuba, among other fixtures of every day life.