He would say, "I do not pretend to transmit a message of reality.
I am moved by the longing to travel within my paintings in a dimension of Spirit where
the intimate and the cosmic converge."
My hope is to have Scholars, Art Historians, Ph.D. Student Candidates, Curators that are
interested in my father's work, come and have access to the archives, and have access to
sit and reflect and look at the work, be able to live with the work for short periods of
time because this is a work that you don't just see.
You have to really look at.
And so, these are little reflective moments of meditation and almost transcendence.
The later period, they're almost transcendence.
So, he invites the viewer to come on this adventure with me, you know?
So, that's what I hope for this space that people can come and sit and reflect, and learn
more about his work.
My name is Hortensia Soriano, and I am the daughter of Rafael Soriano, and also the Director
of the Rafael Soriano Foundation.
My memory is that he would come home from work and he would usually take a little nap
and we would have dinner, and then, he began the process of painting.
And I remember as a child, I only asked my mom one time, "I don't understand why my father
doesn't play with me at night, or why doesn't he watch television with us?"
And my mother said to me, "Your father is in the back room, in the Florida room, doing
very important work."
And I understood that what he was doing back there was pretty special.
It was just that one time, so I always was comforted knowing that he was back there doing
what he loved most.
For me, they were all adventures, and he would bring us in to the Florida room, me and my
mom, when they were completed and he would ask us, what do you see?
What do you feel?
Tell me about the colors, and we would talk about these paintings.
And then, they proceeded to name the paintings.
Him and my mother would give each painting a title.
It was an adventure for me growing up with his paintings and, you know, taking the paintings
outdoors to dry.
And one thing with my mom and my dad, the weather became a big thing in my house because
if you look in the yard, you can see the fence.
There were sometimes three or four paintings, these masterpieces hanging on the fence to
dry.
I'm working right now on the Catalog Raisonné Project, and so far, we've entered about 1,400
works that began in Cuba, and they go all the way through 2000, maybe 2001.
So, it's quite an extensive body of work, considering that his main medium is oil.
And oil takes so long to dry.
If my mom was not, you know, helping him and doing the frames, and mounting the canvases
and always having a fresh canvas for him, he definitely would've not been able to paint
that amount of work that he did, so, yeah, thanks to her, we have this body of work today,
for sure.
I'm going to show you a very beautiful geometric painting that I'm fortunate enough to have
in the collection.
This is called Motivo Del Mar, it's a 1953 piece.
The Estate, maybe about 300 works we still have in the Estate, and right now, we have
LnS GALLERY that is helping us and has the representation of the Estate.
One of the main things that we wanted to do was to showcase to people this tenacity of
Soriano's work of how he was really painting for himself.
He was an artist who was looking at how to continue the chain of Art History, how to
gravitate towards a different visual vocabulary, and really doing it not thinking of any commercial
success at all, but more importantly, about a personal fulfillment.
Which is why I think it creates a really interesting energy to the viewer that Soriano isn't only
an artist that you see, but it's an artist that you feel.
He's an artist who's challenging the notion of abstraction through light, through surrealism,
through atmosphere, almost like if he was our Rothko, our Cuban American Rothko.
He believed in God, and he believed in the Spirit.
And he went inwards, he looked inwards for the sustenance in his life, and I think that
that's what translated on these paintings that luminosity of, yes, the cosmos.
He was fascinated with the "Man on the Moon", when the man walked on the moon in 1969.
And so, these are like moments of landscapes, psychic landscapes of, in this cosmos could
be under the sea in your imagination.
And the colors, he was a colorist, and the colors are very, he always said they had to
do with his Bay of Matanzas which changed colors six or seven times depending on the
time of day.
And so, that light always stayed in his memory, those colors, and so these pallets have to
do with that Bay of Matanzas, which he loved.
Well, it's very important to me for my father's work to find its place in history because
I feel that he's not just a Cuban artist or a Cuban American artist.
He is an artist that belongs to the world, and that's part of the mission of the Foundation
is to place his pieces in museums and in public institutions globally for future generations
to be able to enjoy.
So, yeah, I want people to know that, you know, he was a master.
He was not just a Cuban master, but he's a master period.
And I will say, my father was very, very humble, and he would never have said any of this,
but I'm the daughter, I can say all this.
So, yeah, he was a true master.