Richard Somonte Llerena

Pinar del Río, Cuba, 1991

I believe that painting belongs to the oldest and most universal forms of human expression. Long before nations, ideologies, or even languages divided us, human beings communicated through images. My work is founded on the conviction that painting still retains that power.

Born in Cuba and shaped by a life lived between the Caribbean and Europe, I have always been drawn to visual traditions that, although seemingly distant from one another, share a common emotional language. The works of Eugène Delacroix, Carlos Enríquez, and Utagawa Kuniyoshi have been particularly influential in this respect. Despite belonging to different cultures and historical periods, I find in them the same pursuit of beauty, movement, passion, and human depth.

Throughout my artistic journey, I have searched for images capable of connecting different worlds. The horse was one of the first. It initially emerged as a bridge between European pictorial traditions and the Cuban imagination, later evolving into a broader symbol of freedom, desire, and transformation. My encounter with Japanese woodblock prints, and particularly with the figure of the samurai, opened a new chapter in that same exploration. In the series Tropical Samurai, an imagined warrior travels to the Caribbean and falls in love with an idealized vision of a future Cuba.

Through this character, I explore memory, identity, displacement, and the possibility of reconciling cultures that appear distant from one another. This idea is closely connected to what I describe as l'uomo globalizzato—the globalized human being. It is the belief that contemporary identity no longer belongs exclusively to a single cultural tradition, but is instead shaped by multiple references, influences, and experiences drawn from different parts of the world. In an age defined by global connectivity and the constant exchange of images, ideas, and narratives, cultural boundaries have become increasingly permeable. The samurai of Tropical Samurai embodies this condition: a figure who inhabits different worlds and gradually discovers that what appears to separate them is far less significant than what unites them.

My most recent body of work, Free Mares, returns to the equine motif as both homage and reinterpretation. The series explores freedom not as a political concept, but as a deeply human impulse. The mares inhabit landscapes where Caribbean sensuality and the European pictorial tradition coexist, revealing affinities that transcend geography and history.

For me, painting and eroticism belong to the same sphere of human experience. Both are primordial languages that precede rational explanation. Both speak to something instinctive and universal within us. Through my images, I seek to build bridges between cultures, eras, and sensibilities, reminding us that beauty, desire, and freedom are experiences we ultimately share.