Yornel Martínez Elías

Yornel J. Martínez Elías (b.Manzanillo, Cuba, 1981) lives and works in Havana, Cuba. He studied Visual Arts at the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana and amongst many residencies, he was also a resident at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht during 2022-2023.

In his work, he is looking for connections and erasing borders between artists and artistic expression. His work consists of drawings, installations, texts and interventions in public spaces. With his work, he likes to challenge the viewer to become aware of their own view of the world.

Is artist statement:
My work oprates in the interstice between the poetic and the conceptual, showing a marked interest in language. I try to generate poetic transformations that blur the boundaries between different media: installations, objects, calligrams, paintings and drawings.
Equally, I attach great importance to the exploration of new devices or models for exhibiting the works. Sometimes the projects become public interventions (Exergo, 2012 -intervention in several cinema marquees in La Havana, Cuba), other times they are shown in the form of publications (alternative magazine P-350, 2009), as interventions within specific museum collections (Desoriente, 2018 -intervention in the Asian art collection of the Museo de Artes Decorativas in La Havana, Cuba), or they relate to the existing museum archives (Formas de intervenir un archivo, 2016 -intervention in the archive of the Museo Nacional, La Havana, Cuba).
Overall, I conceive my artistic production from the coexistence of different works that complement and contaminate each other, developing in parallel short and long term projects, to the point in which the creative process reaches a significant place.