BIOGRAPHY - Alberto Hernández Reyes (b.1976)

Trained as a doctor and with a painting career spanning more than two decades, Alberto Hernández Reyes has developed a distinctive visual language that reflects his deep fascination with and reverence for nature. A self-taught artist, he has spent most of his career in his native Cuba. In 2020, he relocated to Spain in search of inspiration along the Mediterranean coast. Two years later, he settled in the United States. Now based in Yonkers, New York, Hernández Reyes continues to translate immersive worlds onto the canvas, inhabited by trees and evocative atmospheres, expressions of his deeply personal and mystical vision.

In his relationship with art, painting is like being suspended in an undefined space, where one contemplates the mists of a contained storm over the landscape. Influenced by Buddhism and the contemplative spirit of the Hudson River School, Hernández Reyes's work turns away from the external gaze and moves inward, toward a meditative encounter with being. What can be seen is transformed into what can be felt; reality becomes a subtle energy, translated onto the canvas through a fusion of memory, intuition, and inherited painterly language.

Through the predominant use of monochrome or limited color palettes, Hernández Reyes offers an almost monastic vision of his pictorial practice. The elements of each composition gradually dissolve, losing their materiality as they draw closer to the light. The scenes in his paintings achieve such a degree of integration that every aspect of the landscape, together with its formal solutions and details, converges organically. Within his canvases, all superfluous distraction is eliminated. Each motif follows a carefully structured conception that seeks to exalt the spiritual meaning of what is contemplated.

What is particularly striking is Hernández Reyes’s treatment of light, which he tends to present in its transcendent dimension. It becomes a creative source from which everything seems to emerge. One has the sensation of being drawn into a vibrant, luminous flux, at times serene and at other times dramatic, as though witnessing the gestation of a dreamlike world. The atmospheres, shaped by light, possess a rhythm akin to breathing: they inhale and exhale an aura that reaches the viewer. Indifference is not possible.

Hernández Reyes has presented his work in numerous solo and group exhibitions across Europe and the Americas, including Cuba, Mexico, Panama, Spain, Germany, and the United States. His paintings are held in private collections on both sides of the Atlantic.