“Alexandre Arrechea: Caribbean Stage” will be on view from May 3 through June 7, 2025, at Simard Bilodeau Contemporary (located at 1923 S. Santa Fe Avenue, Suite 300, Los Angeles, California).
The titles of this series of artworks reference the bountiful, if little known coral reefs that ring the coast of Cuba, grounding these abstract works in something tangible and specific. At its core, Caribbean Stages explores cultural identity and its constantly shifting nature—reshaped by time, distance, and context. Painting these works speaks to the illusion of proximity—how memory, place, and identity can feel close, even intimate, yet remain just out of reach. ~ Alexandrea Arrechea, 2025
Description: Simard Bilodeau Contemporary is thrilled to present Caribbean Stages, a solo show of new works by Cuban artist Alexandre Arrechea on view from 3 May to 7 June 2025. In these abstract figurative pieces, the coral reefs of Cuba’s coastline emerge as metaphors for cultural identity and its mutable nature–reshaped by time, distance and context.
Caribbean Stages is the second of Arrechea’s exhibitions devoted entirely to painting, a practice he has previously referred to as a kind of ‘personal processing’, a means of purging emotion, memory and longing. These new works find their origin in the serene dreamscape Milagros at the Temple of Abundance (2024), a painting first exhibited in Arrechea’s show, Uncharted Surfaces (2024). The vignette depicts the artist’s grandmother, Milagros, tending an imaginary Eden where enchanted plants dance and flail at her touch. Before every school exam, Milagros would tuck a lucky branch from her Tunisian garden into Arrechea’s pocket—a quiet act of faith that taught him to trust in unseen forces. That small ritual, rooted in nature’s unseen strength, becomes a departure point for the exhibition: a meditation on how memory, landscape, and the currents of home continue to shape and guide us, even across distances.
While Arrechea remains committed to abstraction, Caribbean Stages is anchored in this vivid sense of place. The paintings’ titles, borrowed from well-known coral reef formations in Cuba, gesture overtly to its landscape yet it’s the subtly deployed natural motifs––distilling the geological forms of mountains, lakes, and coves into biomorphic silhouettes–– that take us there. A palette of cool blues and burnt earthy ochres evoke the underwater tones of the reefs while the filtered Caribbean light and distinctive hue of its shadows call to mind the weathered architecture of Havana. All this Arrechea synthesises into a kind of formal language, a carnivalesque visual metonymy that deepens his connection to Cuba.
With this new body of work, the artist deliberately resists the sentimentality of nostalgia, reaching instead for something much more intentional and introspective. His ambivalent forms—hallmarks of home—sprout limbs, posture behind masks and vanish as quickly as they arrived, encouraging us to reflect on the fluid, ever-changing nature of diasporic identity. Though no longer immersed in the daily reality of Cuba, the island still exerts its influence on Arrechea, subtly shaping his rhythm and experience. The physical sensations of home—the sea, the breeze, the salt—linger faintly, now replaced by the complexities of immigrant life. In their restless transformations, his paintings evoke the elasticity of memory itself, where belonging is never fixed, but always becoming.
In addition to organic forms and architectures, Caribbean Stages draws inspiration from modeling techniques such as 3D printing and dioramas. These metaphorical frameworks, more familiar to Arrechea’s sculptural practice, allow him to reimagine the canvas not as a flat surface, but as a stage—a place where reality is imagined, assembled, and perpetually reconfigured.
Throughout these paintings, Arrechea builds hybrid enclosures—spaces that invite the viewer to hover at the threshold, always looking in. There is no fixed vantage point; instead, perspective slips and shifts, oscillating between diagrammatic clarity, as in the work ‘Guajaba’, and dreamlike disorientation, as in ‘Guacanayabo’. The illusion of proximity plays out across multiple registers: between interior and exterior worlds, between memory and identity, physical space and image. Familiar forms flicker and dissolve, mirroring the artist’s own experience of diasporic life—of being both close and distant, rooted yet displaced.
The titular concept of the ‘stage’ then unfolds in two directions—both as a theatrical platform for construction and illusion, and as a series of life stages shaped by migration, adaptation, and change. Arrechea’s structures suggest a provisional reality, protected yet still in formation. In this way, Caribbean Stages is his offering of not a literal portrait of Cuba, but a living connection to it—carried through gesture, abstraction, and the ongoing, restless process of becoming.
Alexandre Arrechea (b.1970) was born in Trinidad, Cuba and currently resides between Madrid and Miami. [. . .]
For full bio and more information, see https://www.simardbilodeau.com/exhibitions/50-alexandre-arrechea-caribbean-stages/
“Alexandre Arrechea: Caribbean Stage” will be on view from May 3 through June 7, 2025, at Simard Bilodeau Contemporary (located at 1923 S. Santa Fe Avenue, Suite 300, Los Angeles, California). The titles of this series of artworks reference the bountiful, if little known coral reefs that ring the coast of Cuba, grounding these abstract
