smoke the moon is thrilled to present Burning Island, a solo exhibition of oil paintings by Havana, Cuba artist Alberto Regueira. His paintings are richly rendered scenes with an aura that is both haunting and visionary. Regueira’s work appears as if viewed through a memory, with the ambient intimacies of a place taking center stage. 

Regueira masterfully renders scenes that tie the everyday to the fantastic. Drawing technical and thematic inspiration from the old masters of classical landscape painting, the artist teases out an allegorical theatricality within his artistic lineage. He infuses a phantasmagoric and mystic quality into mundane objects and scenes. There is an unsettling beauty to his work: a blustering island scene erupts in small flames, twinned spires glisten beyond a baseball diamond and winking bushes are balanced against the uncanny glow of a park at night.

Regueira’s work expresses the uncanny vista of both interior and exterior realms. His palette is simultaneously haunting and ecstatic. Washy ochres and decisive, grassy greens illuminate the outer vistas of his canvas. It is as if Regueira is painting a world that stopped still for just a moment to bask in its own surreal pools of reference and haze. 

There is a perpetuity to the promise captured in Burning Island; a world around us filled with the eerie romance of unknown potential. Regueira is painting the breadth of a moment – deeply pigmented and with an internal shimmer.