Alberto Rey:
Cultural Iconography

Exhibition Information

Alberto Rey’s paintings reflect his Cuban-American heritage and, in many ways, are autobiographical. He was born in Havana, Cuba in 1960. In 1963, his family received political asylum in Mexico and he lived in Mexico City until 1965 when they immigrated to the United States. After two years of living in Miami, Florida, his family settled in Barnesboro, Pennsylvania where Alberto grew up and excelled as a student and an athlete. In 1978, he received an appointment to West Point, but opted for an Honorable Discharge and pursued studies in art at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and Indiana University of Pennsylvania where he received his BFA. After working on Christo’s Surrounded Islands Project in Key Biscane, Florida, he moved around the east coast for a few years before settling at the University of Buffalo where he received his MFA in 1987. He moved to Boston where he continued his studies at Harvard while teaching at Lincoln­Sudbury High School, the Art Institute of Boston, the New England Institute of Art and Design, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. In 1989 he received a faculty appointment at state University of New York at Fredonia and married Janeil Strong. He worked as a crew captain on Christa’s Umbrella Project in 1991. In 1993, he received an Artists Projects Grant from the Lower Manhattan Cultural council and the Pyramid Art Center. The following year he was awarded the Hagan Young Scholar/Artist Award from SUNY Fredonia.

A consistent theme of his work in this exhibition was an exploration and interpretation of his multi-cultural past juxtaposed with the present. For example, paintings in his Madonnas of Western New York series combine devotional religious imagery with landscapes of the rural environs around his home in western New York. Inspired by the folk traditions of Mexican retablo paintings, these works represent Alberto’s struggle for reconciliation of his Cuban religious and cultural heritage with his current environment. The Icon Series represents simple, mundane objects that are reconstructed from his memory of childhood experiences in Miami and are presented on large 7’x5′ plaster panels. They combine in a unique way the “low” art of common everyday objects with the “high” art and monumentality of religious icons. Turning away from representation, Alberto’s Binary Forms present abstracted images that seem to float above beautifully prepared surfaces. Expressing the dualities of the past and present, this series focuses on references of the heart and the symbolic combination of dual personalities merged together as one as in marriage. The Madonnas in Time series juxtaposes landscape images of his native Cuba with contemporary landmarks of the western New York countryside. These images hover on a visual field dominated by abstracted binary forms. The Cuban landscapes are not based on memory, but are reconstructed from archival photographs from the pre-Battista and Castro years. Like the rest of Alberto’s work, they are beautifully rendered objects and project a content of the artist’s encounter with vague memories of his past translated into the intelligible language of the present.

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