Dilatation: A solo exhibition by Jorge Luis Santos
Jorge Luis Santos (b. 1973, Quivicán, Cuba) is a Miami-based artist known for his visceral, large-scale abstract works. Over a career spanning more than three decades, Santos has consistently explored new territories in material, form, and technique - working with oil, acrylic, mixed media, found objects, iron, and wood across painting, sculpture, and installation. Rooted in abstraction with gestures that echo abstract expressionism and informalism, Santos’s work is deeply connected to his lived experience in Cuba and abroad. As he notes, abstraction “sympathizes more with my spirit and my way of living.” Now considered one of Cuba’s foremost abstractionists, his works have been included in major collections such as the Pérez Art Museum Miami and the Museum of Cuban Art Vienna. His work has been written about and discussed by prominent Cuban scholars and critics including Rafael Acosta de Arriba, Elivia Rosa Castro, Nelson Herrera Ysla, Elsa Vega Dopico, and José Manuel Noceda, amongst others.
In Dilatation, Santos’s debut exhibition with Square One Gallery, he explores the subtle shifts of quiet transformation with the works lingering in the thresholds between tension and release. Through these meditative passages, Santos reveals opening as both an intimate vulnerability and a profound act of strength.
"In its most intimate sense, dilatation is an opening — a slow, powerful widening that prepares the way for something new. In the body, it signals the beginning of birth; in the garden, the moment when a bud loosens and a flower unfolds. This exhibition moves within that shared territory, where the language of biology and botany intertwines, revealing how every act of blooming is also an act of giving birth.
Here, works trace the thresholds between inside and outside, stillness and movement, potential and release. The opening is not sudden but rhythmic — a gradual expansion shaped by breath, pressure, and time. Through color, form, and gesture, the pieces invite us to inhabit this in-between state, to sense the tension before the release, and the relief after.
The path of dilatation is both physical and symbolic: it is a channel that must widen for life to emerge, yet it is also a metaphor for openness to experience, vulnerability, and transformation. Each artwork becomes a milestone along this passage — a reminder that the act of opening is both a surrender and a strength, a yielding that allows life to pass through.
In Dilatation, blooming and birthing are not separate events but different inflections of the same phenomenon. The show asks us to see them as one continuum — a shared pulse between the human body and the living earth — where every opening is a threshold, and every threshold is a beginning."
-Text by Maylin Perez
