Rafael Montilla (Cube Man): The Reflection of the Cube in Central Park
Cesar Sasson, Correocultural.com
Rafael Montilla (Cube Man): The Reflection of the Cube in Central Park
Venezuelan artist Rafael Montilla —known as Cube Man— will take part in a tribute to John Lennon at the Imagine Shrine in Central Park. His performance, conceived around the cube as both symbol and mirror, engages in a dialogue with Lennon’s memory and his dream of a world without borders.
Acción en homenaje a John Lennon, Central Park
Each year, my wife, daughters and I had a tradition we never failed to honor during our trips to New York: walking to the Imagine Shrine in Central Park West, a circular mosaic that commemorates John Lennon, located near the Dakota Building, where he lived and where he was killed. There, seated on a bench, we would spend a few minutes reflecting on life, on the power of music, and on the need to imagine a world that is fairer and more humane. It was an intimate moment of pause, connection, and remembrance.
That is why I find it profoundly meaningful that the Venezuelan artist Rafael Montilla, known as Cube Man, has been invited to participate in a tribute to Lennon in that very place on October 9, the date of the musician’s birth. On this occasion, Montilla will reaffirm his poetics of the cube: a form that, in his hands, ceases to be a mere geometric volume and becomes a symbol of thought, resonance, and hope. Rooted in the tradition of geometric abstraction, his work transcends aesthetics to become a visual and spiritual manifesto—a search for harmony and balance that echoes Lennon’s universal ideal of imagining a different world: more just, luminous, and free of boundaries.
The cube is one of the oldest and most powerful forms accompanying art and human thought—from Malevich and Suprematism, which elevated it to an emblem of the absolute, to Sol LeWitt’s minimalism, which transformed it into a serial and rational structure. As an elemental figure in geometry, a symbol of stability, order, and mathematical perfection, it has also appeared in architecture and in modern utopias as a promise of clarity and permanence. Yet in Montilla, this order is subverted: the cube upon his head disrupts the logic of stability and becomes a critical device. It conceals his identity, turning him into an anonymous subject, mask and mirror at once, shifting the focus toward the viewer and opening a space where the personal dissolves into the collective.
That mirror erases Montilla’s face and returns the gaze to those who look at him: they see themselves, but also the sky and the earth reflected on its six faces. It is a performance that speaks not of the “I,” but of the “we.” An action in harmony with the lyrics of Imagine, which dream of a world in which we are reflected in one another, beyond race, religion, or nationality.
In that gesture lies a luminous paradox: the artist disappears so that the other may appear. And in the context of a tribute to Lennon—whose voice continues to invite us to dream of a humanity without borders—Montilla’s action resonates with renewed strength. The cube ceases to be mere geometry to become a mirror of the human and a reflection of the possible.
Source: https://correocultural.com/2025/10/rafael-montilla-cube-man-el-reflejo-del-cubo-en-central-park/
