Cuban-American Symbolist Artist | Creator of the Universe of La Parábola
I create art that is not meant to entertain — it is meant to awaken.
My name is Abisay Puentes, and I am a Cuban-American symbolist artist whose entire body of work emerges from a single universe: La Parábola.
For more than thirty years, every painting, poem, and musical composition I have made has been part of this spiritual, philosophical, and existential journey.
I was born in Cuba, where my early artistic impulses were shaped by both beauty and oppression. As a child, I drew obsessively; images became refuge whenever the world felt uncertain.
My mother wanted me to become a musician, and for a time I followed that path — studying piano, learning structure, discipline, rhythm — but while my hands played the keys, my imagination belonged to silence, color, and shadow. Painting was the language I could never abandon.
At seventeen, I entered the Escuela Nacional de Arte in Havana, but I was expelled for wearing a T-shirt that read: “Smile, Jesus Loves You.”
That moment divided my life.
I refused to continue studying under an ideology-driven system.
Instead, I chose to learn independently, guided by two mentors who shaped my life:
Dr. Juan Enrique Guerrero, who taught me art history and philosophy.
Professor René, who taught me to paint with acrylics.
In 2010, I left Cuba as a refugee of conscience.
I came to the United States seeking freedom, truth, and the right to create without fear.
Today I live and work in New York, where La Parábola continues to grow.
La Parábola: The universe behind my paintings
My work is not a set of isolated creations.
It is a cosmology, a chronological map of the human condition.
Each series I paint belongs to a chapter of this universe:
Imposibilitados — the beginning of spiritual blindness
Rito Gular — the machinery built by power and society
Desvanecimiento — the fading of the soul
Brumas (Mist) — the distortion of reality
Mecanikalgia — the human being connected to the machine
Paradox — the collapse of meaning
Vértigo — awakening after ten thousand years
La Parábola tells the story of a man sedated by a symbolic machine — built by Adam and Eve, representing power and society — and his slow journey toward truth.
**I paint what I hear. I compose what I see.**
Though I left music in my adolescence, I returned to it years later when I understood my paintings needed a soundscape to breathe.
La Parábola is not only visual.
It is multisensory.
Each painting has its own music. The painting reveals the wound; the music lets the wound speak.
My art is not decoration.
It is revelation.
My work is spiritual
- not because I preach, but because I have witnessed the fragility of the human soul.
I am not skeptical of God.
I am skeptical of humanity.
My sense of emptiness — visible in Brumas, Paradox, Vértigo, and in my audiovisual work Emptiness — came from believing humanity wanted truth, only to discover that most people prefer comfort over revelation.
My faith, rooted in the Reformed Baptist tradition, shaped my understanding of truth, sin, and awakening.
This theological architecture is the invisible foundation of my art.
A Cuban artist turning exile into revelation
Exile shaped me: physically, emotionally, spiritually.
Leaving Cuba was not only a political escape;
it was a creative rebirth.
I paint the world as I lived it:
fractured, searching, trembling between lie and truth.
Art became the language to express the spiritual fracture that exile carved inside me.
My mission as an artist
I do not want my paintings to be admired from afar.
I want them to confront.
To call.
To awaken something sleeping inside the viewer.
My mission is to create art that:
reveals rather than entertains
confronts rather than decorates
awakens rather than soothes
speaks to the deep wounds of the soul
invites the viewer into a spiritual journey
If a gallery wall or collector’s home becomes a place of revelation because one of my paintings hangs there, then my work has fulfilled its purpose.
If you choose to enter my work, you are not entering an art collection — you are entering a path.
A path through:
blindness
confusion
machinery
fog
collapse
awakening
truth
This is La Parábola —
the universe that has defined my life,
my art,
my faith,
and my exile.
You are invited to walk it with me.
