Contemporary Art by Reiner Viera Díaz
Selected paintings and symbolic visual narratives by Reiner Viera Díaz.
Sixth Sense
Moral
The Next Step
Between My Ego and Me
Even from the Depths We Can Still Dream
Evolutionary Instinct
Gea
Genesis
Guardians
Mediator of Opportunities
The Weight of Inheritance
Venus Tropicalis
Trade
Meeting
Around the Light
Peace & Justice
Another Chair Along the Way
Do the Bells Still Toll?
Lazarus
Illuminated
Trumpet Solo in D Major
Reiner Viera Díaz is a contemporary visual artist whose work explores symbolic encounters between humans, animals, and hybrid creatures. Through layered narratives, his paintings investigate memory, identity, instinct, transformation, and the ambiguity of human experience.
My work explores the human condition through symbolic transformation. The human figure fragments, merges with animals, objects, and other forms, or alters its nature to make visible what cannot always be expressed through appearance: impulses, conflicts, desires, trauma, power relations, and moral contradictions.
Animals do not appear as fantastic or decorative elements; their identities and attributes function as psychological and symbolic extensions of the human being. Hybridization becomes a visual language through which instinct and consciousness coexist, revealing tensions between what we are, what we conceal, and what we may become.
Memory, identity, displacement, and personal experience also inhabit these transformations. Rather than illustrating fixed narratives, I construct situations in which figures, symbols, and relationships remain open to interpretation. The familiar is altered just enough to create uncertainty and invite the viewer to participate in the meaning of the work.
My practice is rooted primarily in oil painting and drawing. Through layered surfaces, transparency, gesture, and shifts between defined and dissolving forms, I seek to create images in which the physical and psychological occupy the same space. For me, transformation is not an escape from reality, but a way of examining it.
Reiner Viera Díaz is a Cuban-born contemporary visual artist based in Burlington, Ontario, Canada. Working primarily in oil painting and drawing, he has developed his artistic practice over more than two decades, exhibiting his work in Cuba, Spain, and Canada.
Viera Díaz studied visual arts in Matanzas, Cuba, graduating from the Roberto Diago Academy in 2002. His broader academic background includes a degree in Medicine from the University of Havana, as well as studies in conservation and restoration at the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana. He later taught at the art academy in Matanzas while continuing his independent artistic practice.
Since moving to Canada in 2020, his work has increasingly explored displacement, memory, identity, and transformation. Human figures, animals, objects, and hybrid forms coexist within layered compositions in which psychological experience and symbolic imagery intersect.
His current practice continues to develop this visual language through painting and drawing, combining figurative representation with fragmentation, transparency, and transformation.
2017 — Gallery La Vigía, “Genesis Scenes,” Matanzas, Cuba
2016 — Matanzas Museum of Art, “Steps and More Steps,” Matanzas, Cuba
2015 — Municipal Gallery La Moderna, “Fishes, Steps, Poses,” Havana, Cuba
2011 — Jagüey Grande Gallery, “Pieces, Steps, Poses,” Matanzas, Cuba
2003 — Exhibitions at two Cultural Centers, Madrid City Council, Madrid, Spain
2002 — Gallery La Vigía, Degree Project: “Living the Limits of the Ego,” Matanzas, Cuba
2016 & 2014 — Provincial Gallery, “Roberto Diago Provincial Competition,” Matanzas, Cuba
2013 — Provincial Gallery, “Salon for Memory,” Matanzas, Cuba
2012 — Exhibition Hall of the Havana Channel, “Great Dreams,” Havana, Cuba
2011 — Collateral Exhibition to the UNEAC Winter Salon, House of Culture Bonifacio Byrne, “Umbrales,” Matanzas, Cuba
2011 — 70th Anniversary Salon of the Academy of Plastic Arts of Matanzas, Matanzas, Cuba
2009 — Toronto Art Fair, Toronto, Canada
CARFAC Ontario — Professional Artist Member
Art Gallery of Burlington — Member
Matanzas Museum of Art — “La última colada,” 2017, oil on canvas, 80 × 100 cm, Matanzas, Cuba