Miguel Florido

Art Brokerage: Miguel Florido Cuban Artist: b. 1980. Miguel Florido was born on October 6, 1980, in San Jose de las Lajas, Havana, Cuba. Florido, a self-taught artist, has garnered several awards and honorable mentions including: First Place, Salon de Pintura Vedasto Acosta, San Jose de las Lajas, Havana, in 2002; Third Place in the International Competition La Mariposa Blanca, given by the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana, Cuba, in 1988; as well as other awards at provincial and national levels given to young Cuban talents. His works are part of private collections in Spain, France, the United States, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Panama, Grand Cayman and Cuba. His work has sold very well at Sotheby’s and Chrisities auction houses. Florido is considered a rising star in the art world. In 2003, journalist Justo J. Sanchez contextualized Florido’s works as follows: The still-life genre, in the manner of Sanchez Cotan and the Dutch masters, is present in two of Florido’s series: Bodies Without Life and Blue Door. They are not works undertaken as virtuoso exercises in painterly technique. Florido considers them “self-portraits” or deep explorations of the magic of his environs. […] The notion of vanitas appears in the Florido canon removed from its Judeo-Christian denotation. In a work like La ultima alegria (2001), the dramatic tension of the fleeting moment –life ephemeral — is communicated with the same tenebristic intensity of the followers of Caravaggio. There is memento absentia rather than memento moris in the oeuvre of this young artist. Absence prompts the pictorial meditations of this Cuban incarnation of Sevillian Renaissance poet Fernando de Herrera. Listings wanted.