José Manuel Mesías is a Cuban artist who works in painting, drawing, video and installation. He studied at the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts in Havana, specializing in sculpture, although it is worth mentioning that painting has been a constant in his artistic career. His interest in crafts, especially carpentry, structures his practice, where the assembly and reuse of disused materials are organically integrated into a coherent artistic language that is today his most outstanding characteristic.

José Mesías' practice is articulated around a work of a markedly eclectic character, where history, memory and appropriation converge. His artistic approach consists of recurrently delving into Cuban history, taking as a starting point references from the 19th century to reexamine omitted stories, silenced areas and perspectives that have been left out of official discourses. Rather than illustrating memory, it interrogates it, thus activating tensions between the documented and the imagined.

Her creative process involves an immersion in mythologies traversed by a dreamlike atmosphere, where the personal and the collective intertwine. At the same time, her acute gaze rescues and resignifies found objects, integrating them into a broad and coherent body of work that dialogues with the tradition of the objet trouvé. Close to the thought of Marcel Duchamp, his work unfolds as a conceptual and visual kaleidoscope in which painting, memory and critical gesture converge with subtlety and depth.

The work of José Manuel Mesías deliberately renounces the notions of sacredness and premeditation that usually accompany creative artifice. His searches emerge, on the contrary, from the fragmentary and the casual, from the residue understood as an alternative memory, as the primary habitat of all possible truths.

Mesías, who once stumbled upon a random object and recognized himself in it, conceives the world as a watering hole for the minimal and the seemingly inconsequential, for the random. That's what it's all about, he thinks, and then paints the landscape of solitude and rain with unlikely greens on the edge of a stone.

His work, which already has more than a decade of experience, has been shown in personal projects such as Verses and Theorems (The apartment at Lubov Gallery, Condo Complex, New York, USA, 2019); Time room, from Index of Images (XIII Havana Biennial, Centro de Desarrollo de Las Artes Visuales, Havana, Cuba, 2019); The straight line is not the shortest (Azkuna Zentroa, Bilbao, 2018), Index of images (Factoría Habana, Havana, Havana, 2017) and About absolute truth (Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami, 2016). He has also participated in group exhibitions of tremendous relevance, among the most prominent are: La Breche (Galleria Continua, Paris, France, 2021); Circular Viewpoint (Galleria Continua, Havana, Cuba, 2020); Going Away Closer: Japan-Cuba Contemporary Art Exhibition (Spiral Cultural Center, Tokyo, 2018), Cuba my love (Galleria Continua, Les Moulins, 2017), The usefulness of history (Factoría Habana, Havana, 2014) and Cuban Video (The Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), Los Angeles, 2014).

He has been awarded Residents Art Dubai, United Arab Emirates in 2019; Akita Art Institute, Japan in 2018 and Anphytrion Residency Program (Azkuna ZentroaArtista X Artista) Bilbao, Spain in 2017, among others.