Look close enough and you may notice a shoe print pressed into dried acrylic on a canvas the size of a garage door, deliberate and repeated, part of the paint rather than an accident of it. Jorge Luis Santos has used a brush taped to a pole, a palette knife, and the sole of his own shoe to build some of the largest abstract paintings coming out of Miami right now.
An Abstract Painter in a Figurative Country
Art education in Cuba, for most of the twentieth century, focused on figuration. Painting the body, the street, the political moment, was the expected language. Santos, born in the small town of Quivicán in 1973, chose abstraction instead, and kept choosing it, showing his work in solo and group exhibitions across the U.S., Italy, and Cuba since 1994.
Cuban critics and historians, including Rafael Acosta de Arriba and Nelson Herrera Ysla, have written about the work over the decades that followed. That early, unusual commitment is a large part of why he's now considered one of Cuba's most important living abstract painters.
Miami, 2016, and a New Palette
Santos relocated to Miami in 2016, and something in the work changed. The palette got brighter, the compositions more expansive, the overall feeling closer to relief than tension.
Gallery notes on his practice describe the shift as one toward resilience and joy, themes that show up literally in his titles: Flores Blancas, Tres Flores, El Fondo del Jardín, "the bottom of the garden." It reads less like a stylistic pivot and more like a painter who had room, for the first time in a while, to work in full color.
Process as Signature
Santos works across acrylic, oil, mixed media, found objects, iron, and wood, and moves between painting, sculpture, and installation. What holds it together is the process: a brush taped to a long pole for reach he couldn't get by hand, a palette knife for texture, a mop or the sole of his shoe when a brush would smooth out exactly the mark he's after.
Cuban Art specialists have placed the work in direct lineage with the peak of abstract expressionism, pointing to the same reliance on automatism and drip technique that defined that movement's most physical painters. The difference is that Santos treats the tool itself as part of the composition, not a means to an end.
In Museums, in Books, in Galleries
His work is held in the permanent collections of the Pérez Art Museum Miami and the Museum of Cuban Art Vienna. In 2018, a 400-page monograph on his career, covering work from 1998 through 2016, was published with text by Cuban art historian José Veigas Zamora. The book was produced with the backing of collectors Jorge M. Pérez, the Miami developer and philanthropist whose name is on the Pérez Art Museum Miami, and José Mario Hernández.
That kind of institutional and collector attention, sustained over three decades, is rare for any painter working in abstraction, let alone one who built it from outside Cuba's dominant tradition.
Seeing Santos at Carousel
Carousel has shown Santos's work at Art Miami and Art Palm Beach, and carries his paintings across its Miami, Atlanta, Chicago, and West Palm Beach galleries. The canvases run large, several past eight feet, and the surfaces reward standing close enough to see where the shoe print ends and the brushwork begins.
FAQ
Who is Jorge Luis Santos? He's a Cuban abstract painter, born in Quivicán in 1973, now based in Miami, known for large-scale, texturally physical canvases built with unconventional tools alongside a brush.
Where is Jorge Luis Santos from? Quivicán, a small town in Cuba's Mayabeque Province, south of Havana. He relocated to Miami in 2016.
What materials does Jorge Luis Santos use? Primarily acrylic and oil, along with mixed media, found objects, iron, and wood, applied with a brush taped to a pole, a palette knife, his hands, and the sole of his shoe.
Is Jorge Luis Santos's work in any museum collections? Yes. His paintings are held by the Pérez Art Museum Miami and the Museum of Cuban Art Vienna.
Where can I see Jorge Luis Santos's work in person? Carousel Fine Art carries his paintings across its Miami, Atlanta, Chicago, and West Palm Beach galleries. See all gallery locations
A painter who spent two decades working against his country's dominant style doesn't stop being an outlier just because a museum eventually buys the work. View available paintings by Jorge Luis Santos or reach out to a Carousel advisor to see what's currently on the wall.
