Ernesto Capdevila
b. 1970
Havana, Cuba
Ernesto Capdevila is a Cuban contemporary artist whose paintings, drawings, and sculptures explore imagination, memory, identity, and the complexity of human experience. Blending surrealist imagery, poetic symbolism, and personal narrative, Capdevila creates richly layered works that move between dream and reality, humor and introspection. His work has been exhibited throughout Europe, North, Central, and South America, and the Caribbean. The artist lives and works in Miami, Florida.
Featured Works
Light Maker
acrylic on canvas
50 x 49 in
text in upper right corner reads: ...con la ambición de un dia que comienza puede que el suelo ilumine tus pasos...
(...with the ambition of a day just beginning, the ground may light your steps...)
Ernesto Capdevila
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Contemplación
acrylic on canvas
54 × 59 in
text in lower right reads: Melancolía de la pérdida
(Melancholy of loss)
Ernesto Capdevila
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Quietud
mixed media
acrylic, charcoal and paster on raw canvas
57 × 45 in
text in lower right reads: Es solo un vuelo y son tantas alas que pueden atropellarse
(It’s only one flight and there are so many wings that can crash into each other)
Ernesto Capdevila
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Landscape #7
acrylic on canvas
42 x 42 in
Ernesto Capdevila
contact for pricing
Ernesto Capdevila
Ernesto Capdevila was born in Havana, Cuba in 1970. He graduated from the Design Institute of Havana in 1992 and continued his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts of San Alejandro, also in Havana, graduating in 1997.
From 1993 through 1999, Capdevila worked as a member of the Experimental Graphic Workshop of Havana, an influential collective dedicated to printmaking and contemporary graphic arts. In 1999, he immigrated to Miami, Florida, where he continues to live and maintain his studio.
Capdevila’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout Europe, North, Central, and South America, as well as the Caribbean.
Working across painting, sculpture, drawing, and text, Capdevila creates deeply personal visual worlds that move between abstraction, symbolism, architecture, and poetic narrative. His work often explores memory, perception, identity, and the layered nature of human experience.
In his ongoing series Parallel Universes, Capdevila constructs densely layered compositions from accumulations of small cubes, cells, and clustered forms that suggest cityscapes, archives, landscapes, or interconnected psychological spaces. For the artist, these structures symbolize individual existences existing simultaneously within a larger collective reality, each containing its own memories, emotions, and lived experiences.
This fragmented yet interconnected vision of reality runs throughout Capdevila’s work, including his more representational and surrealist sculptures and paintings, many of which incorporate handwritten poetry and text by the artist himself. Rather than offering fixed narratives or conclusions, Capdevila approaches art as an attempt to interpret only a fragment of a much larger and unknowable whole.
