Andrés Conde: Beauty, Subtext, and the Politics of Seeing

At first glance, the paintings of Andrés Conde may strike the casual viewer as lushly rendered images, even as “pretty pictures.” His women are beautiful, luminous, and staged with the compositional clarity of pop and commercial art traditions. Yet beneath their surface appeal lies a profound and layered commentary—on Cuba, on politics, on gender, and on the resilience of human dignity. To dismiss Conde’s work as decorative is to miss its central point: it is precisely through beauty that he opens the door to his more urgent and critical subtexts.

The SOCIAL Series: Memory, Loss, and the Cuban Condition

SOCIAL, Nude With Poppies, 2021

Born in Havana, Conde carries within him the indelible imprint of a city transformed, even brutalized, by the socialist revolution. His SOCIAL series is both homage and lament. It is a body of work that remembers Havana’s cosmopolitan elegance while grappling with what was erased in the name of ideology. Through saturated colors and stylized compositions, Conde evokes a city of nightclubs, dance halls, and culture. His paintings do not simply reconstruct a lost Havana; they serve as meditations on rupture, loss, and the resilience of cultural memory under authoritarian constraint.

The Gaze of Women: Power, Vulnerability, and Defiance

If Havana anchors Conde’s exploration of place, women anchor his exploration of humanity. His female subjects are neither victims nor objects of spectacle. They are warriors—unapologetic, strong, and unflinching—yet they remain tender, vulnerable, and profoundly human. Their eyes, carefully rendered and psychologically charged, form the focal point of his canvases. In their gaze, one finds reservoirs of strength, echoes of suffering, and the possibility of transcendence.

Conde has mastered the ability to evoke deep emotional states through the subtlest shifts in line and tone around the eyes. His women embody a paradoxical power: they can be fierce and vulnerable, mothers and daughters, defenders and nurturers, all at once. In his view, their true strength lies in the capacity to endure and to rise—never as victims, but as resilient protectors of themselves, their families, and their communities.

Chaos: Violence, Survival, and Defiance

Chaos, 2023

This vision finds perhaps its starkest expression in Chaos, 2023. The work began as a harrowing depiction of Afghan women in burkas being executed on a soccer field by the Taliban. It was a painting so brutally direct that it lingered in Conde’s studio for years, unsold and avoided—who, after all, would choose to live with such an image? Yet its presence remained, demanding resolution.

Years later, Conde returned to the canvas and reimagined it. He partially scraped away the original scene but allowed its ghost to remain—the soccer field still visible, a haunting reminder of violence. In its place, he painted a single figure: a blonde woman, uncovered, disheveled, her lip slightly swollen, her blouse slipping from one shoulder as she smokes a cigarette. Her appearance suggests she has seen and endured terrible things, but her gaze is unflinching. She stares directly at the viewer, unapologetic, defiant, and wholly unashamed.

Chaos crystallizes what runs through all of Conde’s portrayals of women. They are not painted as martyrs, nor as victims to be pitied. Instead, they embody survival, agency, and defiance. They carry their scars without surrendering their dignity. In this way, Chaos transforms horror into resilience, brutality into confrontation, silence into voice.

Pop, Commerce, and the Subversion of Surface

Conde’s roots in commercial and pop art are unmistakable. The crispness of his compositions, the clarity of his figures, and the seductive surface quality of his canvases borrow directly from traditions of advertising and mass media. Yet, rather than replicate these traditions uncritically, he subverts them.

The “cheesecake” pin-up aesthetic, for example, becomes in his hands a vehicle for assertion. What might appear at first as the male gaze turned artful is instead a profound inversion: women who stare back, daring the viewer to acknowledge their subjectivity, their power, and their emotional complexity. Conde uses the familiarity of pop idioms not to reinforce stereotypes but to undermine them, creating works that are accessible yet deeply layered.

Reverence and Responsibility

Cardinal Directions, 2023

In interviews and practice alike, Conde makes clear his reverence for women. To him, women are creators, the true pillars of strength, and those who endure disproportionate suffering in the face of injustice. Yet he resists portraying them as powerless. His paintings honor women as resilient warriors, rising above injury and injustice, harnessing inner strength not only for themselves but also for the families and communities they protect.

It is in this tension—between surface beauty and psychological depth, between pop culture reference and social critique—that the power of Andrés Conde’s work resides. His canvases remind us that art can be alluring without being shallow, that it can captivate the eye while unsettling the conscience. Through works like Chaos and the SOCIAL series, Conde affirms that beauty, when sharpened by truth, is one of art’s most potent forms of resistance.

- S. Conde