The Why.

Brief Bio

“My father was a political prisoner, he served seven years in Cuban prisons.  His release came after sustaining critical injuries, rendering him useless to the state.  After his release, our family acquired visas to Spain, and with a few gold Spanish coins my father swallowed before leaving the island, we were able to rent an apartment in Madrid, where we lived for two years, making the best of a difficult situation, earning our daily bread by selling sandwiches outside the Plaza de Toros.

It was in Madrid where I was first exposed to fine art and the breathtaking architecture of a centuries old city.

I came to the United States as an immigrant at nine years of age. We went from Cuba to Spain, then Spain to New York. The sharp contrast of my impoverished Cuba with the splendor of Spain, overwhelmed my senses. It seemed master sculptors and painters created the entire city of Madrid just to delight the eyes.  On arriving in New York, I found a different kind of wonderful, skyscrapers touched the clouds, and modern works replaced old masters. I discovered shiny colored spray paint was used instead of sable brushes and pigments.

New York is where I fell in love with pop art. I learned from Lichtenstein and Warhol, whose paintings hung in galleries. I admired Haring’s work in the subway tunnels as my friends and I were throwing pieces up on every bit of blank wall we could find.

Eventually like many other Cubans, settled in Miami.  …so close and yet so far.  I found the bright colors of Miami’s evening sky, tropical setting, and mix of my native Cuba’s culture with that of my adoptive mother, America’s, comforting.

I have always painted or drawn as a means of communication. It’s easier for me to just draw a picture than to explain myself with words. The act of communication became creation.

Art has always been a source of emotional and psychological therapy for me. It relaxes and thrills me at once. I feel energy radiating from the canvas with each brush stroke. The subject’s voices whisper how they feel, and ask to be freed from the heavy white veil of canvas and gesso where they are trapped.

I am forever in awe of women. Their combination of strength and vulnerability fascinates me. The expressive nature of their faces, the beauty of the female form… In nearly all my work I try to portray the dichotomy of strength and vulnerability in people, particularly women, as this combination moves me deeply. For over two decades, my main source of inspiration has been my wife, my muse. It is her soul that I share with the world in every painting.

All of these experiences inspire me, and collectively, are the reason I paint.”

- Andrés Conde

A Critical Biography

by John Sevigny

Andres Conde is a Miami-based Cuban American painter whose work is informed by a range of influences from the sometimes nostalgic esthetics of Edward Hopper to his family's brutal experiences in Cuba.

Born in Havana in 1968, Conde moved to Miami with his family in 1980 after spending a brief period in New York City. He started drawing when he was 14. Conde attended the University of Miami. His first show was at a Miami Beach bar where he worked as a bartender. Conde was 25 at the time.

His early work was inspired by his father's seven-year-imprisonment under the government of dictator Fidel Castro. The work, made when Conde was in his late 20s, was highly critical of Castro's brand of Communism, which was always totalitarianism in a left-wing mask. In particular, it took aim at Ernesto "Che" Guevara, an Argentine guerilla and pop culture icon considered a mass murderer by Cuban exiles and historians despite his omnipresence on T-shirts across the United States and Europe.

"I used to paint pictures of Che with anti-Castro slogans on them but people who were Che fans bought them," Conde remembers. Not long afterward a fellow artist convinced Conde to move away from political work. It's a common course for artists. When you are young you want to tell the world what you believe. But once you've said it, you can't go on repeating yourself. The best artists move on to more personal, less binary work.

Conde's recent work is nostalgic, highly graphic and focuses on the joy of everyday life. Some of his paintings bring back memories of the classic film Casablanca. Others evoke an ironically sad nostalgia for a pre-1959 Cuba. There is also a dose of Miami Beach art deco typefaces to savor. Conde describes his paintings as "scenes of happy times." Those works frequently focus on his wife Stacy Conde, owner of the gallery by which Andres is represented, and his family.

Andres Conde's work is inevitably in part a reaction against the political upheaval that he has seen up close. And that's a good thing. Art needs life-loving artists such as Matisse, Hoffman, Rauschenburg, and Conde just as badly as it needs Kollwitz, German Expressionism and Dada.

*Conde lives and works in Natchez, Mississippi. His work is found in collections across the US, the Caribbean, Europe, Mexico, and South America..