Luis Saldaña Soto - Expressiones AIR Summer 2024

Luis Alberto Saldaña Soto's work (Güines, 1987). In its boundless, immeasurable blue, the artist finds his harbor and anchor. Magic happens in its waters, an intelligible process where he discovers another universe, filled with diverse images that sometimes reflect surrealism or realism, but always through painting. Saldaña graduated in Painting from the Eduardo Abela Provincial Academy of Fine Arts, Provincia Habana, in 2006. He has received several provincial awards, and his work has been part of various national and international exhibitions.

His production is visually varied, characterized by his focus on landscapes, which at times take on metaphysical qualities and explore the present, circumstances, and the transcendent. Living in Mayabeque has significantly influenced his connection to the natural environment and docks, making his personal experiences the vital source of his creations.

Currently, the sea is his motif, fragment, beginning, and end. Saldaña's intense dialogue with its vastness now includes photography to capture moments of change and transformations in its anatomy, expressed in waves and color. Objects appear not within the waters but at their edge, provoking reflections. This discourse is permeated by a certain narcissism, a deep visual poetry where one element uses the other as a mirror, creating a dual complicity. The result is works ranging from small formats to large paintings, originating from photography and embracing the legacy of Impressionism, leading to their expressive content. His journey started by extracting figures from the urban environment and placing them in the sea as Atlanteans, bearers of a previous content now assuming the guise of insularity. This has now transformed into documenting even diluted reality. The distortions of forms place his work on the abstract's edge, conceptualizing reality through water and its reflections. Saldaña challenges us to know each of its secrets, whether from its periphery or the center of its fluidity, always an indigo-tinted adventure where the water resists revealing all its secrets.