Rigoberto Mena: Fire and Gesture

Rigoberto Mena: Fire and Gesture accompanies the exhibition of the same name presented at The Annex Gallery in Cincinnati, bringing together a recent body of work by one of the most compelling voices of contemporary Cuban abstraction. Born in Artemisa, Cuba, in 1961 and currently based in North Carolina, Mena has built a visual language where gesture, color, texture, and structural tension become vehicles for memory, emotion, and lived experience.This catalog gathers works on canvas, prints, and ceramics that expand the artist’s long-standing investigation into abstraction as a form of physical and spiritual presence. In Mena’s work, the mark is never merely formal. It carries the pressure of the hand, the rhythm of the body, the density of urban memory, and the persistence of an inner landscape shaped by displacement, labor, resilience, and renewal. His compositions emerge from the friction between spontaneity and construction, between the freedom of the gesture and the discipline of the surface.Fire and Gesture reveals an artist moving across materials without abandoning the essential vocabulary that has defined his practice. The canvases and prints retain the energy of painting as an event: layered, urgent, atmospheric, and deeply tactile. The ceramic works introduce another register of transformation, where fire, matter, and touch become part of the language of abstraction. Through clay, Mena’s gestures acquire volume, weight, and objecthood, extending his painterly sensibility into forms that seem at once ancient and contemporary.Rather than illustrating a fixed narrative, these works invite the viewer into a field of sensations. Color becomes temperature. Line becomes movement. Texture becomes memory. The exhibition affirms Mena’s ability to transform abstraction into a space of encounter, where the visible surface holds traces of personal history, cultural inheritance, and emotional intensity.With an international trajectory that includes exhibitions across Europe, the Americas, and Asia, and works held in significant public and private collections, Rigoberto Mena continues to expand the possibilities of Cuban abstraction. This publication documents a moment of material openness and creative force, offering readers and collectors an intimate view of an artist for whom making remains an act of fire, gesture, and profound visual conviction. Read more