Adrian Sutton Gallery is proud to present its inaugural exhibition at the new Paris space by the Cuban-born, Miami-based artist, William Osorio. Bringing together a selection of new oil-on-canvas paintings, these large-scale works place the musical concept of contrapunto (counterpoint) at their centre, which defines the relationship between two voices or lines that are harmonically interdependent, yet independent in their rhythm and melodic contour.
Osorio uses this as a way of reflecting on his own experience of exile, having left Cuba for the United States at the age of eighteen before he had completed his art school training. This move profoundly shifted his approach to reality: instilled with a new awareness and fascination, he remembers looking at the world from a different point of view, with a hunger for discovery, yet his own cultural roots and language too continued to underpin and shape his life and relationships.
Osorio says: “These works were painted during of one of the largest exoduses of Cubans to the United States in years – more than 300,000 Cubans arrived at the United States border seeking refuge between 2021 and 2023. This phenomenon made me think about my own departure from Cuba. My family won a visa lottery, but I left because of the political situation in Cuba, and the ways in which this affected life on every level. When I went to art school, only then did I realised the profound censorship that was there. It was like an invisible wall. As a kid, I had a ‘normal’ upbringing, my preoccupations where as same as everyone else. But at art school, there’s no way you can mature intellectually in an honest way, or experiment with your intellect; I realised I couldn’t develop as an artist in Cuba, that I would experience a road block at every turn. I was obsessed with the notion of freedom. Yet now I feel something is pulling me to that beginning, to those origins.”
Drawing upon his immediate and intimate circle, Osorio’s figurative works depict people from his everyday life including family, friends and his partner, as well as self-portraits, placing his own image in vibrant, energised landscapes of sky, land and sea. Water is a reference point that recurs throughout Osorio’s canvases, echoing his own journey and sense of movement, and the state of separation that he experienced. Osorio emphasises, “the part of the ocean that is really meaningful for the Cuban diaspora in United States is the Florida Strait (estrecho de la florida). It’s like an aquatic brother because the narrowest point between Key West and the Cuban shore is only ninety-three miles wide.”
Take, for example, With a Thousand Eyes, the river looked II (2022), a surreal image in which Osorio emerges, eyes closed, from a swirling pool of rich blues and greens. The splashed flecks of azure above suggest heavens that are about to thunder down, and a dreamlike mood of calm is on the edge of whirling into something else entirely, another atmosphere altogether. Based on Henri Matisse’s painting Bather (1909), in which a man wades through a monochrome of ultramarine, the contours of Matisse’s figure include many adjustments in pencil and paint, and as such, the pose seems to be constantly changing. He is almost like a dance, and it’s no coincidence that Matisse went onto make two paintings titled Dance only a few months later. Osorio’s own work echoes this sense of movement, his arms raised out of the water as if in a moment of rhythmic drive.
One of the exhibition’s centrepieces is The Bird (2022), in which two people lay in a meadow. With a sharp horizon line separating the land and sky, great sweeping clouds reverberate in the frenzy of long grass below, which seems to swell and sway, blowing in different directions amid the wind. Drawing upon a painting in the Musée d'Orsay by Jules Bastien-Lepage titled Les Foins (Haymaking, 1877), Osorio mirrors the composition of the two main figures, one of whom lays is repose, asleep in the hay, while the other sits upright, a stark look on her face, arms outstretched before her with upturned palms. Bastien-Lepage specialised in agricultural scenes, which were a departure from the pastoral works more commonly displayed in the period’s Salon. Depicting the French countryside, Les Foins was seen as a masterpiece of naturalism. It portrays the despondency of local farmers, their weariness with life, and was inspired by a poem that depicted, “The reaper stretched out on his bed of fresh grass / Sleeps with clenched fists while / The tedder, faint and fuddled, tanned by the sun, / Sits vacantly dreaming beside him [...].”
Intrigued by this sense of cavernous reflectiveness, Osorio turned instead to a poem by the Mexican writer Octavio Paz, in which he traces the essence of something fleeting that catapults you into a moment of deep contemplation. Osorio depicts himself and his partner in this canvas; she finds herself in this moment of thoughtful connection and looks up momentarily from reading a book. Her calm inward-looking gaze is offset by the painting’s lively textures, her mustard-yellow dress enlivened with lush daubs of ochre, orange and white, which sit in contrast to the delicate and smooth brushwork of her arms and legs.
Osorio began by making a collaged photograph as a reference point for the canvas, using an image taken in a park and meticulously splicing in different sections of landscape. By contrast, Osorio’s painting process was in fact viscerally material, pouring thick applications of paint directly onto the floor-based canvas and using this as his mixing palette, then collecting pieces of wood from his garden, which became his paintbrushes. He says: “I couldn’t achieve the necessary movement with a brush.” Indeed, the artist says, “I love the idea of improvisation. And it is similar to music, which it is rooted in knowledge – you can only improvise with that knowledge. From the outside it may seem chaotic, but experimentation can only happen within 12 musical notes – it cannot go outside of these. Chaos is structured in it’s own right.”
Another work, The Swan (2022), depicts a man sinking into a leather chair, his fingers raised to his face, eyes closed. The same lively orangey-yellow hues are dotted with white, mirroring their appearance in Baudelaire seated on a Louis XIII Chair (1885). These shape the soft contours of a towel wrapped around the figure’s head. The work is directly based on a black-and-white photograph of the French poet Charles Baudelaire, in which he reclines into an ornate armchair and gazes directly into the lens. A misty haze of grey fills the frame above him, one hand raised to his face, the other clasping a white handkerchief. In contrast to this photograph, Osorio’s closed eyelids suggest a private poetic peace, perhaps contemplating days gone by. He underlines that “I have to carry the weight of my culture,” continuing, “I feel that real identity is in language, in the way we speak, in the way we think.” Here, his identity is described through a sense of inward journeying, swirling patterns of paint evoking a kind of psycho-geography, marked by land and sky.
Having left art school for the United States before he was able to complete his degree, Osorio says: “I didn’t strictly learn all the rules, so I break them in a naïve way. I feel there’s beauty in that, and I’m happy not to have that stricture, which can become a small prison in which you live. But I have that other structure: my identity. I’m a mix of black and white Cuban: I have the influence from Spain and the Afro-Cuban part, with its rich history and religious references. I don’t practice any form of faith, but the Afro-Cuban tradition is central to our identity, the African legacy goes beyond the religious realm, it extends to the music, the food, and even the rhythmic intonation of our Spanish.”
Osorio’s exhibition manifests the melodic contours of such structures, with a personal reality that merges inner and outer worlds, movements across oceans, and the dreamlike veracity of delving into your own universe.
