El Misterio de la Noche (2024) by Alejandro Piñeiro Bello.
Photo: Courtesy of Pace Gallery
Artist to Watch: Alejandro Piñeiro Bello Taps into Dreamscapes and Magical Realms
The Cuban painter’s vibrant works tread the line between figuration and abstraction
Artist Alejandro Piñeiro Bello. Photo: Courtesy of the artist
For Alejandro Piñeiro Bello, the act of painting is a constant conversation. “I’m in the studio all day on my own, but I’m talking to artists, to poets,” he says. “It’s like they’re still alive.” He might start a discussion with the late Cuban author Virgilio Piñera: “I became obsessed with his poem ‘La Isla en Peso’ from the 1940s.” Or with Amelia Peláez, “one of the most important modernist painters in Latin America.”
Piñeiro Bello, who was born in Havana, creates paintings that tread the line between figuration and abstraction. “They are inspired by the physical landscape but also the landscape that exists in memory,” he says of his tropical, Technicolor canvases that both summon Cuba’s natural beauty and capture its spirit. Beaches and coconut trees are swept into swirling, mystical explorations of vibrant, energetic color.
El Misterio de la Noche (2024) by Alejandro Piñeiro Bello. Photo: Courtesy of Pace Gallery
For the past four years, Piñeiro Bello has lived and worked in Miami. Last year was a breakout period for the artist, whose work was the subject of solo shows, including one at Miami’s Rubell Museum, where he was an artist in residence, and Pace gallery in Seoul, South Korea. In September, he filled Pace’s London outpost with paintings and works on paper; the show, titled “Entre el Día y la Noche,” was both his largest exhibition to date and his first in the U.K.
“I wanted to bring a lot of color to London,” says Piñeiro Bello. “The exhibition lives between night and day, between someone that is dreaming and someone that is awake.” The monumental El Misterio de la Noche is “my Starry Night,” he says of the canvas, which is nearly 20 feet wide, a “scale you get lost in.” The painting is centered on “a father figure grabbing a child by the hand,” explains Piñeiro Bello, who has an eight-year-old daughter. Of his success, he adds: “It’s like a dream. I wake up every day and wonder, How did this happen? I think magic really works.”
A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2024 Collectors Issue in the “Artists to Watch” section. Subscribe to the magazine.
Cover: El Misterio de la Noche (2024) by Alejandro Piñeiro Bello.
Photo: Courtesy of Pace Gallery
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