Julia Morrisroe
Aldo Leopold, the conservationist, forester and philosopher, observed the seasonal changes and migratory patterns of wild life in his book A Sand County Almanac. The slender volume is a diary of sorts, where Leopold recorded the rhythm of the natural world and shared his enthusiasm about the arrival of the Canadian geese, the sun burnt grass in the depth of summer and the first snow of winter. Like Leopold, Miguel Saludes is a careful observer of his location. He sees things that we do not and his paintings capture his intimate relationship with his world.
Birth of the World and Pennsylvania Corn Field are joyful paintings of the earth’s bounty that explode with color. Yet they are also reminders of the brevity of life. This theme is sharper in Life After the Fire as Miguel captures the beautiful regeneration of the Florida landscape and its remarkable capacity for renewal after calamity.
Whether he is studying the grass or a wooden floor, Saludes’ exacting craftsmanship, his devotional layering of pigment upon pigment, allows us to look with him. His paintings invite us to feel his vision, as stroke by stroke, he constructs his gaze for us. In a world that feels sped up, Miguel’s paintings ask us to slow down. To look, not just glance, and to take pleasure in the beauty that surround us."
Artist and Associate Professor of Art at University of Florida
Text written for the catalog of American Rural Idylls, Kendall Art Center, 2018.
Henry Ballate
"The Impressionists, accepting the challenge of transcending figuration to capture a pure and sensorial reality: the patches of light from the sun’s rays through the leaves of a tree, the hazy imprecision of the sea mist, demonstrated that there was a reality that did not obey clarity. If by the 1860s there had been academies and art salons in Florida, their artists would have also undoubtedly been pioneers of Impressionism. The following is demonstrated to me by Miguel Saludes, an artist who, with a spontaneity unique to our time, captures light with
loose, broken and fast brushstrokes which gives us this look into our environment, even evoking titles like "The Artist's Studio", 2018, where all of the pictorial elements seem touched by the light after the rain; in that brief and fleeting moment of the sunset on the west coast of Florida. In "Till Death Do Us
Part", 2018, Saludes proves that the Light and its decomposition over Florida is impressionistic by nature."
Artist and curator
Text written for the catalog of American Rural Idylls, Kendall Art Center, 2018.
Aldo Menendez
"Yourden y Saludes destierran el drama y la figura humana, estableciendo unas propuestas condescendientes que respectivamente le hacen guiños en clave al bodegón, y al paisaje romántico. Para Yourden la organización de los objetos equivale a la intervención humana, en Saludes la ordenación de las flores y el ritmo se refieren al cuidado humano de la huerta. De modo que sin la presencia del hombre, con solo su huella, Yourden se vuelca en un efectismo eficaz y pulcro, y Saludes en una ornamentación que se diría quiere hacer volar por los aires los jardines de Gustav Klimt y Monet (ver de Saludes su obra Blue Field with Flamboyant Blossom. Lo que ambos hacen nos permite transitar de la seducción de las cosas al reino de lo bucólico e idílico, del cálculo al eco de La Pastoral en Fantasía de Disney."
Vidual artist, art critic and columnist
"Pintura de ataque, '4 Artistas, una Generación." May, 4th, 2018. El Nuevo Herald.
Joaquin Badajoz
"...Observe Lotti’s radiography of the “efichensi” (a vernacular pronunciation of efficiency), that affordable living space that has become the door to the American dream for many immigrants and crucial to understanding the sociology of Cuban-American immigration; or Miguel Saludes’ pixilation and augmentation of reality, enlarging the American landscape, from a field of flowers to a concrete wall, scrutinizing the surrounding, processing its dualities to the limits of abstraction until digested into a totally new identity; or Labañino’s contractile reality that merges different points of view into the same plane, allowing blurred memories and details to coexist in the same space. These three artists are crossed by their hyphenated identities, Cuban-Americans belonging and bonding like most of us, challenging traditional painting to express their personal journey into a new ecosystem, a journey that we are from now on thankful they shared with us."
Writer, editor, journalist, art critic and curator
Excerpt from the catalog of Alloys: A Cuban American Tale.
Concrete Space Art Gallery 2017.
Ricardo Pau-Llosa
"Saludes is a born story-teller. His lyrical and despondent paintings conjure the vanquished epic of Cuban memory. The cliché old car and bicycle become geometric sculptures irradiated by light and brushwork. The staircase and the overflow from a water basin counterpoint their static and kinetic patterns. All this in a chromatic range both oneiric and delectable. Beyond sanctuary and lamentation lies the action of memory Saludes engages, one which digests the present with as much ferocity as it devours the past, much as death dismantles the body of a dead bird on the ground, denying it its citizenship in beauty but granting it a role in identity."
Writer, poet, and art critic.
Excerpt from the Sérverus exhibition catalog, Amat Art Gallery, 2013.