Into the Light | Hacia La Luz

Born in 1920 in the town of Cidra in the province of Matanzas, Cuba, Rafael Soriano manifested an early inclination for painting. After completing seven years of study at Havana’s prestigious Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro, he graduated in 1941 as professor of painting, drawing, and sculpture. He then returned to Matanzas, where he taught visual arts for nearly two decades. Soriano was a co-founder, and later director, of the Escuela de Bellas Artes de Matanzas, the most important art school in Cuba outside of Havana. He was one of the major Latin American artists of his generation and one of the premier painters of Cuba.

In 1962 Soriano went into exile, settling in Miami with his wife, Milagros, and his daughter, Hortensia. There he made a living as a graphic designer and teacher, before eventually turning to painting full time. In Miami, the experience of being uprooted from his home country and starting anew in a foreign place resulted in a deeper connection to the spiritual world. Consequently, Soriano developed a new visual language and body of work that while still couched in abstraction, signaled a departure from the concrete variant he helped pioneer in Cuba. Beloved both as a teacher and master artist, Soriano is considered among the most important painters of abstraction in modern and contemporary Cuban art.