Alexandre Arrechea: Caribbean Stages

Simard Bilodeau Contemporary is thrilled to present Caribbean Stages, a solo show of new works by Cuban artist Alexandre Arrechea on view from 3 May to 7 June 2025. In these abstract figurative pieces, the coral reefs of Cuba’s coastline emerge as metaphors for cultural identity and its mutable nature–reshaped by time, distance and context.

 

Caribbean Stages is the second of Arrechea’s exhibitions devoted entirely to painting, a practice he has previously referred to as a kind of ‘personal processing’, a means of purging emotion, memory and longing. These new works find their origin in the serene dreamscape Milagros at the Temple of Abundance (2024), a painting first exhibited in Arrechea’s show, Uncharted Surfaces (2024). The vignette depicts the artist’s grandmother, Milagros, tending an imaginary Eden where enchanted plants dance and flail at her touch. Before every school exam, Milagros would tuck a lucky branch from her Tunisian garden into Arrechea’s pocket—a quiet act of faith that taught him to trust in unseen forces. That small ritual, rooted in nature’s unseen strength, becomes a departure point for the exhibition: a meditation on how memory, landscape, and the currents of home continue to shape and guide us, even across distances.

 

While Arrechea remains committed to abstraction, Caribbean Stages is anchored in this vivid sense of place. The paintings' titles, borrowed from well-known coral reef formations in Cuba, gesture overtly to its landscape yet it’s the subtly deployed natural motifs––distilling the geological forms of mountains, lakes, and coves into biomorphic silhouettes–– that take us there. A palette of cool blues and burnt earthy ochres evoke the underwater tones of the reefs while the filtered Caribbean light and distinctive hue of its shadows call to mind the weathered architecture of Havana. All this Arrechea synthesises into a kind of formal language, a carnivalesque visual metonymy that deepens his connection to Cuba.

 

With this new body of work, the artist deliberately resists the sentimentality of nostalgia, reaching instead for something much more intentional and introspective. His ambivalent forms—hallmarks of home—sprout limbs, posture behind masks and vanish as quickly as they arrived, encouraging us to reflect on the fluid, ever-changing nature of diasporic identity. Though no longer immersed in the daily reality of Cuba, the island still exerts its influence on Arrechea, subtly shaping his rhythm and experience. The physical sensations of home—the sea, the breeze, the salt—linger faintly, now replaced by the complexities of immigrant life. In their restless transformations, his paintings evoke the elasticity of memory itself, where belonging is never fixed, but always becoming.

 

In addition to organic forms and architectures, Caribbean Stages draws inspiration from modeling techniques such as 3D printing and dioramas. These metaphorical frameworks, more familiar to Arrechea’s sculptural practice, allow him to reimagine the canvas not as a flat surface, but as a stage—a place where reality is imagined, assembled, and perpetually reconfigured.

 

Throughout these paintings, Arrechea builds hybrid enclosures—spaces that invite the viewer to hover at the threshold, always looking in. There is no fixed vantage point; instead, perspective slips and shifts, oscillating between diagrammatic clarity, as in the work ‘Guajaba’, and dreamlike disorientation, as in ‘Guacanayabo’. The illusion of proximity plays out across multiple registers: between interior and exterior worlds, between memory and identity, physical space and image. Familiar forms flicker and dissolve, mirroring the artist’s own experience of diasporic life—of being both close and distant, rooted yet displaced.

 

The titular concept of the ‘stage’ then unfolds in two directions—both as a theatrical platform for construction and illusion, and as a series of life stages shaped by migration, adaptation, and change. Arrechea’s structures suggest a provisional reality, protected yet still in formation. In this way, Caribbean Stages is his offering of not a literal portrait of Cuba, but a living connection to it—carried through gesture, abstraction, and the ongoing, restless process of becoming.

 

 

Alexandre Arrechea (b.1970) was born in Trinidad, Cuba and currently resides between Madrid and Miami. He first gained international recognition as a founding member of the Cuban collective Los Carpinteros (1991–2003). Since launching his solo career, Arrechea has produced ambitious public projects such as NoLimits (2013), a series of monumental sculptures along Park Avenue in New York, and Katrina Chairs (2016) at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. In 2020, he unveiled Dreaming with Lions at Faena Miami Beach—an immersive circular installation inspired by Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Recent highlights include Hexagon Garden (2022), a collaboration with Balmain, Black Sabbath the ballet (2023) with the Birmingham Royal Ballet for which he designed set and costumes, and Intersected Horizons (2024) his most recent museum survey curated by Gabriela Urtiaga at MOLAA in Long Beach, California. Arrechea earned his BFA from the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) in Havana in 1994. His solo exhibitions have been presented at leading institutions such as the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana, the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, and PS1 Contemporary Art Center in New York. His work is also held in the permanent collections of major museums including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), LACMA, Museo Reina Sofía, MUDAM Luxembourg, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and PAMM, among others.