About the Artists

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Biography: 

Alessandro Sarno is a photographer born and raised in Italy. in 2008, he made his first trip to The Bahamas, and it was a trip that changed his life. Mesmerized by the incredible blue waters, he was compelled to buy his first camera. What started out as a short vacation transformed into a deep love for both photography and for the The Bahamas, where he still feels most inspired to capture everyday moments of life.   

He published five coffee table books, Blue And Beyond,  Catch Da Cat, Eleuthera, The Garden Of Freedom and Exumas The Kingdom Of Blue to portray life in The Bahamas, and Junkanoo-The Spirit of a People to tell the story of Junkanoo, the most important cultural event in The Bahamas. 

He also published a very unique photographic travel guide of the island of Eleuthera called White Bull on the Highway, and a luxury paperback book about one of the most beautiful parks in the world, Exuma Cays Land & Sea Park. Alessandro’s work has been featured in many group shows in The Bahamas and the United States, including Kroma Gallery’s Goombay—An Homage to Coconut Grove—a Junkanoo-themed exhibition in Miami. His latest show The Spirit of a People is currently on show at the Betsy Hotel in Miami Beach.

He finds inspiration traveling around the Islands of The Bahamas; his photography focuses on the vernacular, on the indigenous expressions of people he encounters, on landscapes, wildlife. He is drawn to the interstices of Bahamian life: worship services, concerts, funerals, civic activities and all the little details which emerge in between. Alessandro’s eye tends to see the present as if it were already the past, in such a way he pursues the timeless feel of his images. Alessandro’s photos also often have a painterly, dreamlike quality, the roots of which harken back to time spent drawing and making pictures from a very young age.

Alessandro is a lone traveler and considers photography his travel companion, hence his artistic name, “The Lonesome Photographer”, which also draws inspiration from the classic and lyrical road-less-traveled book, Lonesome Traveler, by novelist and poet, Jack Kerouac.

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Biography: 

Sergio Fiorentino was born in Catania, Italy in 1973.

After his classical studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, he devoted himself for years to the study and research of design and decorative arts of the twentieth century.

In 2011 he resumed painting, and from that moment, he started various exhibitions in public offices and private galleries. He now lives and works in Noto, a UNESCO World Heritage site on the southeastern edge of Sicily.

In Sergio’s well-known series (The Dreamers, The Twins, The Faces, The Saints, The Diverts), the investigation of the body and its external appearance seems like a priority: the artist is not lost in scenographic effects, nor takes refuge between the wounds of feeling.

His creations are incarnations of a classical beauty of formal clarity that links up with realism to magical realism and the Italian twentieth century style from Donghi to Sironi to Casorati.

The same choice of subjects is indicative; although drawn from real models, their athleticism emphasizes the structure of the limbs, the strength and elasticity of organs that aim only at taking appropriate postures. And yet, on closer inspection, the blue – or the white – that surrounds almost all the characters opens up a gap in further dimensions.

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Biography: 

 Douglas Diaz was born in 1971, in Brooklyn, New York. Douglas he began drawing at an early age. Art was his refuge, a mechanism to navigate the world. Encouraged to draw by his parents and grandmother, Douglas would spend long hours, lost in the creation of his own world, while straddling the cacophony of daily life.

During a month-long trip to Japan, he came across an artist that would steer him back into art. Deep in the mountains of Yoshino County in the Nara Prefecture of Japan, renowned to be the most spiritual and sacred of places, he encountered a clarity and peace that would change his life once more. During the first days of his trip, he would meet Sakamoto Kazuyuki, an artist heavily influenced by the Gutai group of the late 60s. Sakamoto san would impart to Douglas the need to cultivate a daily practice, steeped in spiritual rigor that placed a greater emphasis on the body rather than the mind to achieve the purest expression of the soul.

Before thoughts, images, or even concepts can take hold, Douglas begins to draw. Transitioning from seated meditation to drawing on the floor allows for a direct translation between the clarity attained during zazen to the expression on paper or canvas. Everything in the process has been reduced to its minimal elements. This reductionism is most evident in his choice of mediums: graphite and paper.

Reminiscent of a monk’s monastic life, Douglas’ artistic practice reflects his pilgrimage to find inner peace through his distinctively elaborate abstract paintings.

His works represent a deeply intimate manifestation of his journey, as he transits between periods of conflict, departure, homeless, movement and the unknown. His pilgrimage leaves behind an incomplete version of himself in order to transform into an inclusive self that is both personal and universal, capable of developing a deep connection to everything that exist in the universe and the most intimate aspects of his being.

To him, art is a refuge of sorts. On the one hand, it serves as a place for safe explorations into questions about his humanity; a place to challenge his innermost fears and darkness that lurks in the shadows of his being. As such, he endeavours to exhaust a topic, insight or thought that appears after a short zazen. On the other hand, his refuge takes shapes after his drawings are completed, in the collective body of work that is being generated becomes a new path for living. In it, he finds new insights and habits that are played out over days only to fall back into questioning on the next session.

The visual elements of his works are deliberate attempts to simplify the means in order to produce an honest questioning. The markings evolve to become more directs, shortening the preamble to arrive at the most vulnerable insight at any given moment.

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Biography: 

Miami-based artist Erin Parish paints fields of colorful abstract forms, creating atmospheric and liminal spaces to be experienced intuitively and physically. Her subtly layered works of resin and paint offer a sense of quietude and depth.

Glossy resin surfaces and vivid colors draw the eye in, while abstract forms seem to endlessly shift and move across the painting’s surface. Her painting process uses color and spherical forms to evoke a sense of depth and volume. The circular forms are activated through repetition, layering and transparency. In this way, Parish is able to build a site for abstract experience and metaphysical contemplation.

Parish currently works and resides in Miami Beach. She studied at Bennington College in Vermont and Queens College in New York. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, and featured in publications including The New York Times, Luxe Magazine, and BOMB Magazine.

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Biography: 

Raul Conti was born in Morteros, Province of Cordoba in Argentina, in 1931 and became a US citizen in 1997. Conti’s works, both paintings and sculptures speak volumes through symbols universal to man. 

Although he often employs Pre- Columbian elements, these works have a proto-historical perspective common to the whole race. Beginning in his adolescence, under the tutelage of Alfredo Lazzari and Juan Grela, Conti studied throughout Latin America and Europe. 

His interests have long been centered on the resolution of plastic compositions through the austerity of a palette based on earth tones. Later, he sought the luminosity of forms through the contrast of complementary colours using saturated dyes. He blends the saturated dyes with their complementary producing greys of colours that have evolved in his works. He is committed to the seemingly contradictory worlds of meaning and emotion, expressing basic impulses that appeal to a distant faculty.

Conti’s travels and many exhibitions through Latin America, allowed him to explore the symbolic subject matter of Pre- Columbian Art. As Hector Cartier pointed out “going beyond that, Conti perceives that modern art after centuries of illusionary visualization, has penetrated (allowing an opportunity for a more significant encounter with those vital roots) into the core of archaic imagery: Images generally born of an image- conjuring world impregnated by mythical and sacred impulses”. His life and work have been divided between his studios in Hell’s Kitchen, New York since 1977 and Buenos Aires, Argentina 

Today, Conti’s painting is lit. It’s brilliant. The creations of this octogenarian artist have the power of a young painter. His characters, which retain some the statism, silence, and flatness of their pictures with a pre-Columbian seal, become to others. They look like something out of an oriental comic and inhabit a strange and exuberant universe, such as the artist saw near the shrine of Our Lady of Itati, in Corrientes, when first launched himself into the art world.

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Biography: 

Maximo Caminero was born in the Dominican Republic in 1962. His work is rooted in ancient Taino (first inhabitants of the Antilles), its forms have a resonance in the present with a modern view. The versatility of his paintings goes through the Caribbean horizon, touching without hiding the African legacy. He only captures the physical essence of these faraway desires. 

When he got married, Maximo established his residence in Texas, in the United States, where he painted regularly since 1984. Accustomed to creating in the Design District of Miami, since 1990, he moved to Miami Beach in 1995, where works such as Diptych in Oblivion (1999) are born, in which abstract surrealism becomes evident, without neglecting his interest in the first settlers of his native island. 

In 2000 he opened a studio on Miami’s Biscayne Boulevard, where he remained for 15 years. Through this space, artists of various nationalities, writers, poets, and intellectuals, who shared encounters with the artist, nourished themselves in the gatherings, the music, and the poetry while painting. These interactions produce in Caminero’s work a language capable of transmitting the invisible through abstract forms that flow in harmonic strokes and colors and that try to transmit to the observer the nature of its universe. 

His work as he defines it: “It’s a reflection of thought, where we wander in a world more real, far beyond the man-made, everything is philosophy”, he says and adds, “nothing is found, man creates his dreams and realities and supports himself in fictional worlds. I do not escape it, I create my own world, my language. Although my story is recreated day by day, in the human struggle in its defects and effects, I express the subconscious as this shows sovereignty and unknown, my religion” he concludes, “is uncertain, because I also know, that I know nothing.” 

Backed by a number of prestigious critics, his works have been auctioned at prestigious houses in America, and some acquired by South and North American museums.