Alain Pino

Abstract vs. Figurative Portrait - Watercolor by Cuban Artist Alain Pino

2019

ALAIN PINO Havana and Miami-based artist Alain Pino was born in 1974 in Camagüey, Cuba. Pino is a multi-disciplinary conceptual artist who deftly crosses artistic borders - painter, draftsman, printmaker, photographer and sculptor. He is a graduate of the Instituto Superior de Arte. Pino is a co-founder, with Niels Moleiro and Mario Miguel González (Mayito), of the artist collective The Merger. He remained in the group for eight years, departing in 2017. During his time with The Merger, he was afforded the opportunity to further explore his varied disciplines while focusing on bridging conceptual and pop, without rejecting the academic. Prior to his work with The Merger, Pino enjoyed success as a solo artist, exhibiting throughout Cuba, the U.S., Canada, Europe and Latin America. STATEMENT My work is a reflection of social and political events that happen around me daily. I make use of the social and cultural patterns I am familiar with – I extract visuals from the news, the street, historic materials and other sources and mix them in search of the new meanings that come out of their interaction. Portraits are a big portion of my work. I realize them in photography, painting and installation. They are full of contradictions. I not only create androgynous characters, but place them in paradoxical situations that I create by having them dialogue with certain objects. Formally my pieces are hybrid. I take advantage of the formal resources that different materials and genre offer. Alain Pino offers a very fresh look of his reality –the Cuba of the end of the nineties and the beginnings of the new century. When other artists choose to narrate what is going on around them, Pine focuses on the individual. The characters of his photographs are shady, strange –often androgynous and in situations or poses that are undefined and mysterious, as species that went through a metamorphosis and have evolved in order to deal with their new environment. By focusing on people instead of events, he calls attention to the social change that is taking place in the island. (Yuneikys Villalonga, marzo del 2006).