Critics & Press

Perceptual sensibilities and aesthetic inclinations began to reveal themselves early in the life of the Cuban artist Luis Alberto Saldaña Soto; I would even venture to say long before he decided to pursue academic training in art. A great influence in that process was the awakening of his fondness for drawing at an early age, but also his repeated contact with the natural surroundings of his home province, Mayabeque: his interaction with the countryside, with wild vegetation, and above all with the rivers and coastal areas that abound in that island territory, on both its northern and southern shores. Saldaña often recalls the many outings he made with his father to hunt or fish, the long hours they spent together contemplating the wide rural and maritime expanses of the area. That everyday exchange with nature, which perhaps did no more than reproduce the customs and pastimes of a large part of the region's inhabitants, had a particularly strong impact on the development of his creative aptitudes and, above all, on the shaping of an initial visual poetics, almost bucolic in spirit, with which he would reinterpret his surroundings through painting. Curiously, everything was set, in that passage from childhood to adolescence, for the landscape of nature to become, among all the genres of representation, the main object of his creative compulsion. His case is emblematic of the movement of champions of landscape that has been developing authentically in the west of the country.

The earliest known works of the young Saldaña reflected an essentially simulative intention: the artist strove to recreate scenes from a costumbrista point of view, to establish a generally open, panoramic kind of observation, in keeping with the state of wonder, of fascination with his surroundings, that he sought to convey. His approaches played at emulating the sinuous forms of the rural landscape, exalting the presence of the human figure within them, in a constant tension of prominence and scale. He then decided to introduce a surrealist approach into images that combine the countryside and the sea (relevant series in this respect are Observador observado and Utopías), which would gradually strengthen the metaphorical sense of his work and draw still more attention from the art world. But it is without doubt in the purely maritime landscape that this fantastic touch reaches its fullest expression. Unlike other painters of his generation in Mayabeque, who went on developing the rural landscape, Luis Saldaña chose to give free rein to his passion for the sea, to the pull that those states of suggestion and mystery arising from the immensity and depth of the ocean held over him… “just as happens in life itself”, as he has said more than once when speaking of the subject from a symbolic point of view. I would venture to say that it was that liquid universe of transparencies and reflections, of many tonalities, that fully unleashed the artist's imagination; that brought his speculative skills to their peak; that led him to improvise fable-like realms in which the terrestrial and the aquatic, human figures and animals ingeniously coexist; that brought him to the notion of superimposed worlds, of parallel dimensions, of symbolic alternations between high and low planes, between the sidereal and the mundane, which gives many of his spaces a distinctive stamp. At times that surrealist foundation turns to somewhat more factual, deducible figurative suggestions, above all when the author's intention is to reinforce the urgent character of existential and philosophical speculation (the Estereotipos series). Even so, the watery condition and marine details interact within this iconographic approach, whether as complementary planes of the scene or as inductive objects that close the cycle of the overall allegory.

As a result of the process of maturity and pictorial refinement the artist has reached in recent years, his work has begun to reconsider the supremacy of maritime settings: sometimes as contextual, narrative pretexts, as fields for re-signifying the weight of absence and social uncertainty (the Insulares series), and at other times as spaces of visual and sensory experimentation. He still ventures at times into panoramic figurative compositions, close to nature itself and to the historical conventions of the genre, with a technical virtue that pleases, and claims for itself, a good part of the Mexican and American art and collecting circuit. However, in what some of us consider his boldest and most innovative pictorial work (the Agua especular series), the vanishing point, the point of attention and focus, is reduced; the perceptual plane is condensed; and he takes the high risk of weighing up dynamic movement, the sensation of chance changes, the exchange of geometric appearances that reproduce themselves as an endless cycle on the changing surface of the sea, involving light, refraction, colour and line. It occurs to me that these pieces also put into practice a conception of the surreal, the dreamlike, what is most anchored in the induction of mirage, of hallucination and even of the psychedelic. Such is the obsession with pictorial trial and experiment in this body of work that the artist is not afraid to venture even into abstract variations; variations that, in his case, do not seek to enable a deconstructive operation, the free will of the gestural brushstroke, an expressionist attitude per se, but to improvise a new order in the distribution of the elements; another logic of synthesis or compositional condensation that does not automatically answer to what is seen at first hand in the water, whether directly or through the photographic lens, but to what is inferred or intuited from the depths of contemplation and the capacity for association. These “abstract” exercises show how far the artist is willing to go to deepen his optical studies and knowledge of territorial waters, and to become an expert in that kind of environmental representation. In this series Saldaña does not freeze the rhythm, the flow of the tides, the sway of the waves; he heightens the movement, and at times even seems to anticipate the direction and acceleration of the masses of water, of the currents. And he can achieve this with an economy of tools and means that very few marine painters can boast of today; with a rationality of devices that only an educated, perceptive eye such as the one he now possesses can put into practice.

David Mateo · Mexico, April 2026 · Written for the book Selected Works 2004–2026 (CdeCuba Art Books, 2026). · Translated from the Spanish

I met Luis just over ten years ago, at an encounter I still remember today as deeply meaningful. He was presenting his work at a major gallery, and from that very moment, it was impossible not to sense the strength of his talent and the authenticity of his essence.

Over the years, I have had the privilege of admiring him first as a collector, then as a friend, and later as a colleague in this exciting world of art. At every stage, Luis has shown that his work is not the product of chance, but of tireless discipline, admirable precision, and absolute devotion to his vision.

His work reflects detail, consistency, and a tenacity that can be seen not only in his paintings but in his way of living. His seas are not merely contemplated—they are felt; they convey the depth of an artist who has remained true to himself and to his path.

Those of us who know him closely —his friends, his family— know that behind every achievement lie profound dreams we have watched take shape, grow, and, many times, share.

We have faced great challenges and battles together, and in each of them it has become clear that his success is not only well deserved, but also the natural consequence of his commitment and passion.

Today, as we celebrate his 20-year career, it is an honor to recognize the great artist who has left his mark on those of us fortunate enough to walk alongside him.

With admiration and affection,

Daniel Granja Peniche · 2026 · Daniel Granja Peniche, Arte1010 Gallery. From the book Selected Works 2004–2026 (CdeCuba Art Books, 2026); English as published in the book. · Translated from the Spanish

The sea, always the sea, seems to herald with one voice the whole of Luis Alberto Saldaña Soto’s work (Güines, 1987), for it is in that uncontainable, immeasurable blue that the artist finds his harbour and his anchorage. Among its waters the magic happens, an intelligible process in which he discovers an other universe, teeming with disparate images in which the influences of surrealism or realism can at times be discerned, but invariably with painting as his medium. Saldaña graduated in Painting from the Eduardo Abela Provincial Academy of Fine Arts of Havana Province in 2006. He has received several awards at provincial salons, and his work has featured in a range of national and international exhibitions.

His is a body of work of varied visuality, marked by his commitment to landscape. A landscape that at moments takes on metaphysical traits and inquires into the present, circumstance and the transcendent. To a great extent, living in Mayabeque has strengthened his closeness to the natural environment, to the piers. Hence his personal experience is the vital source from which his creations spring.

The series De mares y retornos marks the first moment in which the sea claims his attention, and its representations take on disparate legacies: surrealism, realism, impressionism. It would be followed by Piedra viva, in which Saldaña changes his method and now organises the whole composition around a single natural element as protagonist. The artist paints different rocks in multiple contexts, creating new meanings through the title; these settings range from a road to a lawn or a room, but in every one, without exception, the hard material is nothing other than a metaphor for the human being and their inner conflicts. Matter, then, is a mere excuse, a disguise to conceal the soul.

The concern with formal solutions close to photorealism, and the transformation of his poetics, become evident in Insulares, where he reflects on the circumstance of remaining on the island. The transformation of objects arises precisely from their being placed within the maritime space and taken out of their usual settings, like the ladder in Exit, or Vecino; both pieces make a clear allusion to emigration.

Entropías makes up a map of resistance, of struggle between objects and the sea – no longer always a sea that does not wound, but one that leaves its mark where the horizon clouds over, and that lays bare the traces of salt on objects, their erosion. As in Piedra viva, atmosphere once again becomes a fundamental element in giving the piece greater energy. The object bears witness to the passing of time. The wear it causes and the rust remain as the trace of what the waters have corroded, of exodus, of the scars and evocations of a continent. Through painting, Entropías reveals a cartography of uprooting with all its implications: the new shoots, the witnesses, the trafficking and the survivors, the waiting that at times becomes infinite.

Today the sea is motif, fragment, beginning and end. Saldaña has reached a point of such intense dialogue with its immensity that he now seeks, with the help of the camera, moments of change, transformations in its anatomy, manifested in undulations and colour. Objects are present, but no longer within the waters; they sit barely at their edge, as if leaning over to provoke a reflection.

The discourse, then, is permeated by a certain narcissism, by a flirtation of deep visual poetry in which one uses the other as a mirror and a dual complicity is born. The result is a body of pieces ranging from ensembles of small formats to larger paintings that start from photography and embrace the legacies of impressionism – hence their great expressive charge. A path that began with the extraction of figures from the everyday urban environment and their placement in the sea – like atlantes bearing a prior content that now put on other garments, those of insularity – is now overturned, mutating towards a circumstance in which even dissolved reality begins to be documented.

The distortion of forms places his work on the borders of abstraction, to the point that it can be seen as a conceptualisation of reality through water and its reflections. Towards the deep azure, source of life and death, Saldaña leads us, as a challenge to know each of its tangles, from its margins or from the very centre of its fluidity. Either way, it is always an adventure tinged with indigo, in which the water refuses to reveal all its secrets.

Estela Ferrer · 2022 · Published in CdeCuba Art Magazine · Translated from the Spanish · source

From his native Mayabeque, Luis Alberto Saldaña Soto recreates an other universe, teeming with images in which the influences of surrealism or realism can at times be discerned, but always with painting as his medium. On this occasion he talks to us about his series Insulares, in which his concern with formal solutions close to photorealism, and the transformation of his poetics, become evident.

Saldaña graduated in Painting from the “Eduardo Abela” Provincial Academy of Fine Arts of Havana Province in 2006. He has received several awards at provincial salons, and his work has featured in a range of national and international exhibitions.

Those small varieties of visual language have been mixed together ever since I set out, at art school, to make work tied to landscape – but the landscape of Magritte, of surrealism – and the ambiguity of his work left a deep mark on my way of working. In fact, to this day I go on working with landscape, but always a very ambiguous, suggestive and metaphysical landscape that explores the mystique of the dual landscape through a striking effect. The treatment has always been tied to photography, to reality, with a Magrittean precedent.

Lately I’ve been interested in breaking out of the moulds a little more. I’ve worked in series, and that has allowed me to study more closely the things that interest me: colour in one, a more reduced palette in another. The result is a treatment aimed at effect, but tied to the composition of the element in focus – definable, conceptualised – yet always from a very photorealist aesthetic.

Like every landscape painter, I have always worked from my surroundings. I create from objects, lights and situations I come across. I always try to draw the work from my personal experience. I might see an image in a magazine and it leads me to something else, sparks a creative idea for a work which, in a first phase of the Insulares series, I always complemented with the sea or a kind of landscape in which that object would denote the island condition: that we are people of an island and we are surrounded by water. The object conditioned the human being and offered a reading charged with several meanings. Even though the sea was the backdrop, it acted upon the object and made each work different.

Then I worked on Entropías, which was my most recent solo exhibition. Then everything changed: the objects I used to plant in the sea, I now went out to look for. I found them and, starting from photography, from a more photorealist, documentary-style treatment of the found object, I created an atmosphere for the object in its natural surroundings. What interested me was making the passage of time visible, the transformation it works on things, which is in a way the human essence.

The title is harder for me than the work. Ideas emerge from experiences, from relationships. Since my paintings are synthetic landscapes – with a single element – I’ve made a practice of giving them a direct, one-word title, but one that doesn’t close the painting off. The title is a success or a failure within the work, and whenever my works have had one, it has been very carefully thought out.

I’ve been staging this series gradually, measuring it out, preparing myself for a new phase I intend to take on now. In this series there will be more pictorial freedom, more searching in matters of process, in the handling of the paint itself – that conceptualisation of reality seen through water.

The theme of insularity has been a constant in my pieces; it is what unites the whole aesthetic of my landscape and of this series, which is made of reflections, fragments of forms in the water. In essence the sea and water were always there, and now I can see a whole world in that series of spectres they form – unstable, unrepeatable forms that I capture and freeze from reality. It is a surface that reflects an other reality. As for the solutions, the gestural quality of impressionism and post-impressionism will be fundamental to the materialisation of the artistic process.

Estela Ferrer · 2022 · Interview · Translated from the Spanish · source

From the modest height and gentle slope of the Loma de Candela one can see the beauty of the Güines Valley, landscapes that capture every pair of eyes that looks upon them, whether visitors or those born in the town. It is impossible to pass by and not see – more than merely look. Luis Alberto Saldaña Soto is a young man who carries in his brush the freshness of the countryside and the damned circumstance of water everywhere.

Luis Alberto Saldaña Soto was born in Güines on 11 May 1987, the elder of the two children of Luis Alberto, a welder by training but a fisherman by trade, and Vivian, a pulmonologist. When he was barely four, his parents moved to the countryside on the outskirts of the town. Luis lived there until he was twelve. Although he always had a leaning towards drawing, he never attended the workshops at the municipal Casa de Cultura, as it was too far from home. Months before the entrance tests for the Eduardo Abela Provincial Academy of Fine Arts were held, his parents asked the visual artist José González to advise and teach him.

The visual reflection of objective reality, dissolved into metaphor, is the leitmotif of Luis Alberto Saldaña Soto’s work. His paintings are characterised by a journey along the perceptual limits of reality, with plays of absence and representation. His pieces are minimal, with centred compositions and successive planes, as though a Chinese box were being taken apart. The polychrome impasto of the blues neither subordinates nor dulls the drawing, which stands out, impeccable and meticulous. Saldaña has worked with different icons in his different phases: at school, fish; on graduating, eyes; and today, the stone – but all of them always submerged and (co)related in that sea which flows from his pores into his brush.

At just twenty-nine, Saldaña already has nine solo exhibitions and more than forty group shows in Cuba and abroad to his name. Worth highlighting are his participation in several exhibitions held in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, during his stay in that sister country as part of the Corazón Adentro mission, and at The World Art Gallery and Reneé Gallery, both in Miami, Florida. A total of twelve prizes and honourable mentions support his curriculum vitae; among the most important are an honourable mention at the 21st “Eduardo Abela” Provincial Salon of Visual Arts at the Centre for Visual Arts in San Antonio de los Baños in 2006, and, in 2008, the Prize at the 20th Arístides Fernández Salon of Visual Arts at the Güines Art Gallery. Luis Alberto’s work is held in private collections in the United States, Spain, Venezuela, Italy, Switzerland and Iran. He is a member of the Asociación Hermanos Saíz and of the Fondo Cubano de Bienes Culturales.

In 2002 Luis Alberto Saldaña Soto enrolled at the “Eduardo Abela” Provincial Academy of Fine Arts in San Antonio de los Baños, graduating in 2006 with a Gold Diploma as the top graduate in painting. In his first year the young Saldaña took illustration and drawing classes with the master Dimas Bladimir González Linares, but… drawn by colour and the magic of oil paint, he decided in his second year to specialise in painting, even knowing that his teacher would call him – affectionately – “Luis the traitor” throughout his four years of study. Another native of Güines, the painter Justo Amable, would become his new teacher and thesis supervisor, as would Alexander Silva. This trio of artists would teach him to paint like Rubens, to see art like Warhol, landscape like Tomás Sánchez and iconoclastic irony like Magritte.

2015 marked his artistic take-off beyond the home ground that had watched Saldaña Soto grow as an artist. Not only did he organise the ITEMS project with visual artists from the municipality of Güines, but he also collaborated with the filmmaker Lizet Vila’s PALOMAS project on the documentary “Mujeres…el alma profunda; las hijas de las estrellas.”

2015 also opened the doors of the city’s galleries to him, with his inclusion in the Cuban Contemporary Art Salon “POST_IT 3” at the Galeano Gallery, and in the Second National Landscape Salon, organised by the “La Acacia” Gallery. Although it did not win a prize, the work “Exit” was much discussed by public and critics alike. Luis Alberto starts from the blues to seek a way out from the sea towards that sky promised with diamonds, where what is needed – it seems – is a ladder, this time a spiral staircase winding like a seashell, so that with each turn you see what you are leaving behind. Poetically and existentially, Saldaña brings migration to the canvas: whoever is born and lives on an Island never breaks with the sea.

Two important solo exhibitions have brought Luis Alberto Saldaña Soto before many eyes: “De mares y retornos”, shown in 2015 at the ICAIC Film Cultural Centre “Fresa y chocolate”, and “Piedra Viva”, at the Carmen Montilla Gallery in May of this year.

The translucent blues arrived in more than twelve oils on canvas in De mares y retornos; symbolic, passionate, turbulent and playful are these waters, in which human figures and objects alike levitate and wait. The uncertainty, the loneliness and the fear of departures and returns are the meeting point in these paintings, in which Luis warns the viewer who awaits him, and gives him hope.

The stone as structure, Island, concrete fragment; the human being who, in the end, like a stone, turns to ash: such was the thesis of Piedra Viva. In this exhibition Saldaña reveals himself to us through a metaphysical surrealism so real that any eye could believe it. The stone as a living element is the great protagonist: the one that can open or close a path, the one that can make us fall when we stumble over it; the mysterious stone that emerged from some seabed, from the heart of a volcano or from a meteor shower speaks and breathes in Luis Alberto Saldaña Soto’s impeccable brushwork.

Yuray Tolentino Hevia · 2016 · Translated from the Spanish · source