Rising Painter Alejandro Piñeiro Bello Makes a Bold London Debut with Ethereal Landscapes
Portrait of Alejandro Piñeiro Bello. Courtesy of Pace Gallery.
Alejandro Piñeiro Bello, La Espiral Luminosa, 2024. Courtesy of Pace Gallery.
Alejandro Piñeiro Bello discovered his love for art at four years old in his stepfather’s sculpture studio in Havana, Cuba. Filled with an eclectic mix of oil paints, ceramic masks, and sculptures, the studio was a playground for creative expression and exploration for the young Piñeiro Bello. “I discovered paradise when I saw that studio,” Piñeiro Bello told Artsy from Miami, where he lives now.
Now 34, Piñeiro Bello channels the transformative experiences in his stepfather’s studio into his paintings. In particular, his work El Misterio De La Noche (2024) portrays this pivotal transition by depicting an adult figure leading a child across a sprawling, otherworldly terrain dotted with swirling colors and dreamlike forms. It mirrors the artist’s childlike wonder and his evolution from protégé to mentor: “There is an adult taking a child into the realm of the unknown, into the realm of imagination, which is essentially what I try to do every day.” This massive work anchors his London debut at Pace Gallery, “Entre El Día Y La Noche,” on view from September 4th through 28th.
When he was a teenager in Havana, Piñeiro Bello’s mother used to insist that he’d become an artist—a dream he only began to take seriously at 14. Two years later, he was accepted into San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts, the oldest and most prestigious academy in Cuba, boasting alumni such as Wifredo Lam and Amelia Peláez. There, Piñeiro Bello immersed himself into a diverse curriculum, exploring everything from engraving to sculpture until landing on his ultimate passion: painting. At only 20, he became an instructor at the academy.
Often rendered on raw materials such as linen, burlap, or hemp primed with animal glue, Piñeiro Bello’s gestural work is rife with Cuban influences. His color palette invokes key Cuban painters such as Manuel Mendive and Víctor Manuel García Valdés. However, his hyper-saturated paintings deviate from his predecessors’ more opaque use of color, instead opting for fluid, mercurial color fields, as in Viajando En La Franja Del Iris (2024), a 5.5-by-12-foot landscape evocative of a setting sun over the ocean.
For Piñeiro Bello, the Cuban landscape—from its oceanside horizons to sunlit forests—is so rich with inspiration that he feels a kinship with the artists who have traversed these environments before him. He sees his own creative process as a continuation of their legacy and discoveries.
“In the methodological parts of the painting, I started realizing that I’m doing a line—a curve that is portraying how light hits a tree, for example—I realize why Wifredo Lam did certain things in his paintings,” said Piñeiro Bello. “It’s a realization—a connection…now I understand why [for] this artist—from a particular place called Cuba—this came to his mind.”
In “Entre El Día Y La Noche,” Piñeiro Bello is particularly focused on the subtle yet dramatic transition of light in both nightfall and dawn. The colors in his paintings oscillate between the cool, shadowy hues of the night, seen in the moonlit landscape Noche Ardorosa, and the warm, glowing tones of Lovers (both 2024), depicting two figures against a radiant beachside horizon. By exaggerating the color schemes and obscuring the definition of the natural landscape, Piñeiro Bello intends to create “a space that doesn’t really exist in reality, but more in imagination.”
Alejandro Piñeiro Bello, Niño Escapando Del Paraíso, 2024. Courtesy of Pace Gallery.
Spectral figures populate many of the uncanny topographies in these works without clear intention or direction. In fact, these figures often seep into the environment itself, as seen in Niño Escapando Del Paraíso (2023–24), where a young boy is swallowed by the whirling ocean. It’s evident in these scenes how Piñeiro Bello takes inspiration from writers from Cuba, such as José Lezama Lima and Alejo Carpentier, whose work is often defined by non-linear storytelling.
In many of the works, Piñeiro Bello employs the spiral, often hidden in the sun or the ocean, to symbolize the cyclical nature of life and the intertwining of past, present, and future. This motif is most directly explored in La Espiral Luminosa (2024), where a giant iridescent spiral wraps around a palm tree on a small island. These fantastical swirls, seamlessly integrated into the natural world, suggest a harmonious connection between the imagined and our real lives.
Portrait of Alejandro Piñeiro Bello in his Miami studio. Courtesy of Pace Gallery.
“After years of using the spiral as a symbol of infinite growth, I started realizing that many artists and mythological stories reference it extensively,” said Piñeiro Bello. “One day, I was listening to [Cuban novelist] Alejo Carpentier reading a passage about a man appreciating a spiral shell on a beach, and I realized this shell was a perfect analogy for life itself.”
Time, for Piñeiro Bello’s paintings, is about renewal, always spinning something new. Taking similar steps but creating a new path, like the adult figure guiding a child through the otherworldly landscape in El Misterio De La Noche, illustrates this sense of childhood wonder with a more confident creative drive. Just like the passing cycles of days and nights, these phases cycle back, again and again, to inspire him anew.
