I am Alba +
I am an Artist
About Alba
Born in Havana, Cuba, Ernesto Alba is a visual artist currently living and working in Canada. Having spent the past years travelling and living in different countries and cities, his work reflects an ongoing dialogue between memory, identity, displacement, and the human condition.
Working with charcoal, oil pastel, oil, and acrylic on canvas and paper, Alba creates interconnected compositions that move between abstraction and figuration. His visual language draws from Renaissance, Baroque, and Rococo traditions, while religious symbolism, particularly Catholic and Cuban iconography, provides a recurring vocabulary through which he explores the complexities of human existence.
At the heart of his practice lies an intimate relationship between personal memory and the physical and emotional landscape of Havana. Its deteriorating architecture, stained walls, rusted surfaces, broken tiles, and unexpected combinations of colour have become metaphors for a more personal form of decay. Marked by an emotionally neglected childhood, Alba recognizes in the city's fractures a reflection of his own inner landscape. Yet, beneath the damage, he discovers an unexpected beauty, a fragile poetry that emerges through imperfection, vulnerability, and the passage of time.
His paintings are neither straightforward narratives nor depictions of recognizable places. Human bodies, organic forms, architectural fragments, and abstract environments merge into dreamlike spaces where memory and imagination become indistinguishable. Figures dissolve, transform, and reappear, suggesting a continuous process of metamorphosis between the physical and the psychological.
The tension between the absurdity of human existence and the enduring search for meaning in a world shaped by uncertainty and suffering evokes the philosophical reflections of Albert Camus. In a similar spirit, Alba's work confronts the contradictions of existence, exploring the possibility of finding beauty, significance, and even poetry within the fragility of the human condition.
Ultimately, his paintings are deeply autobiographical without being exclusively personal. They are fragments of a life transformed into colour, gesture, and matter, where beauty and destruction, darkness and light, coexist. They are, above all, images of himself.
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My name is Alba
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