A DAY IN THE STUDIO OF… Fredy Villamil
Cuban American painter Fredy Villamil opens the doors of his studio to me in southwest Miami. I arrive early, at just the right time for coffee (although in Miami, and among Cubans, there is always an excuse for a cafecito). A few steps away, at The Cask, whose owners are friends of the painter, we sip lattes and listen to stories of resilience from a Venezuelan and a Nicaraguan.
Back at the studio, amid white walls and a ceiling too high to even think about, we pick up a spear that holds ritual secrets, a work-stained palette knife, and tubes of paint, all of them blue. There is a bottle of absinthe that we never open; it remains on the table like a totem, and it will stay there all day.
Fredy Villamil (San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba, 1980) brings together figuration and abstraction with a distinctly Caribbean expressive force. Influenced by masters such as Picasso, Chagall, Van Gogh, and Monet, the artist explores nostalgia and the human condition.
As he holds a spear that may one day end up driven into one of his works, as though preserving a wound forever, he tells me that over the years his work has become wilder, more intense. And I can see it in his brushstrokes, in the force of the color, in the lavishness of the paint. His works invite the dangerous act of touching them, of feeling the textures of the pigment, the surface of a newly discovered planet.
I have brought along a Fujifilm camera that, somewhat reluctantly, reminds us of the permanence of the instantaneous, the irreversibility of color and composition. I leave a couple of photographs on the table in which we smile into a soulless, irritating flash, as though the light itself were jolting our eyes. And I take with me his flowers, lodged in my iris, his impossible ponds of violet reflections, water lilies, and water hyacinths.
Painting has accompanied Villamil since childhood in San Antonio de los Baños, the town he remembers as “magical,” surrounded by a marvelous river. It was there that his earliest images began to take shape, under the influence of his father, Francisco “Pancho” Villamil, and his painting teacher, Rubén Suárez Quidiello. He has lived in Miami since 2010, the city where he has built his career and maintains his studio and gallery.
It is difficult to confine his painting to a single movement, and he does not seem particularly interested in doing so either. He speaks of Baroque, Surrealism, Expressionism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionist brushwork, and Fauvism. Sometimes, he says, he prefers to call it “Bridge Expressionism”: a fusion of Spanish and English, much like South Florida itself. In the end, the labels disappear before the act of painting. “I enjoy the process. I forget about all those things,” he says.
His unmistakable signature also reveals itself in scale: large-format works and human groupings that crowd the canvas, figures that seem to carry collective histories within them. That dimension took on another meaning after the July 11, 2021, protests in Cuba, when Villamil embarked on a visual project with Diario Las Américas inspired by the social movement that emerged on the island. Throughout the project, he created original works to illustrate a recurring section in the newspaper’s print edition, bringing painting into an unusual territory: the pages of a daily newspaper. The initiative received the support of then-Senator Marco Rubio, now U.S. Secretary of State, who highlighted the role artists played in the movement that arose within Cuba.
Villamil’s work has traveled to venues and events including the Barcelona Art Biennial, the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, the historic Salon d’Automne in Paris, the Hamptons Fine Art Fair, and several editions of Art Miami and CONTEXT Art Miami. In 2021, he received the Palm Art Award Certificate of Excellence, and in 2026, he presented a series of 37 paintings in tribute to Vincent van Gogh, culminating, no less, in a work created before the Dutch master’s grave.
Villamilartgallery.com
4728 SW 72nd Ave, Miami, FL 33155
