Darian Mederos

A figurative painter, Mederos works in oil, on canvas or linen, from photographs of his models. "When I photograph my models, I can take hundreds of pictures before capturing exactly what I'm looking for," he explains (interview with Irene Sperber, MiamiArtZine, 2015). He says he long feared the face before making it his almost exclusive subject, and names Rembrandt, Caravaggio and Velázquez as his references. His signature lies in an interposed screen: a sheet of bubble wrap painted over the portrait. Beneath this film the light refracts and the image breaks apart; one must step back for the face to recompose, and up close the painting becomes again a sequence of broad strokes of flesh and light. This is the principle of the "Obscura series", a photorealist abstraction in which concealment becomes the subject. The faces he chooses are expressionless: "I paint mostly expressionless faces; the faces themselves show no emotion. The expression in my work is in the eyes of my models. What lies behind those eyes, I couldn't say: it's open to interpretation" (same interview). He expects two things from it, he says: "a kind of communication between the viewer and the painting", and the pleasure of the one who looks. Today he frames his work around perception and memory, in "the psychological space between what is seen and what is remembered" (text from his website), and sums it up with the sentence on his home page: "Paintings are like mirrors. You only see a reflection of yourself."

Darian Rodríguez Mederos was born in 1992 in Santa Clara, in central Cuba. He first trained for two years at the Leopoldo Romañach academy in his home town, then completed his studies with two years at the San Alejandro National Academy of Fine Arts in Havana. He left Cuba at twenty-two, alone, and settled in Miami. According to the biographical note circulated by his galleries, within six weeks he was noticed by Conde Contemporary, the gallery of Stacy Conde and Andres Conde, which became his main gallery: from the summer of 2015 he featured in the group exhibition "Contemporary Cuban Figurativism", and his work was shown at American fairs — Art Santa Fe, LA Art Show, SPECTRUM Art Miami, CONTEXT Art Miami, CONTEXT New York. From 2019 he also exhibited with Arcadia Contemporary. In November 2020, HOFA Gallery in London gave him his first solo exhibition, "God is a Woman": twelve new canvases in which he broadened the portrait to the full-length female figure. The same year, Galerie Calderone presented him at the London Art Fair. His work has been shown in Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Santa Fe, London and Dinard, and is held in private collections in a dozen countries. He has lived and worked in Miami, then Nashville; his London gallery now places him in Natchez, Mississippi.