Adventum Floridana invites viewers to experience Florida’s transforming landscapes through the embodied and painterly lens of Cuban-born artist Andrés Cabrera-García. Working with oil on canvas and found materials, Cabrera-García captures the fragile tension between natural environments and the encroachment of modern development.
Rather than depicting idealized vistas, his large-scale paintings explore the in-between spaces—bridges, roadsides, and construction zones—where urban expansion collides with ecological memory. Inspired by the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and his notion of perception as a bodily, immersive act, the exhibition considers landscape not as a backdrop, but as a living archive of time, memory, and transformation.
At the center of the exhibition is Platonic Ridge, a monumental polyptych that reimagines the Atlantic Coastal Ridge—a natural formation steeped in Indigenous and geological history—as a dreamlike terrain of loss and regeneration. Alongside the paintings, fragments of construction debris collected by the artist function as sculptural traces, grounding the works in the physical world they represent.
Blending personal memory with anthropological and ecological inquiry, Adventum Floridana bears witness to a horizon in flux. In doing so, it asks us to slow down, to feel, and to consider what remains when landscapes shift—and what can be preserved through art.
Artists: Andrés Cabrera-Garcia
Curated by Sophie Bonet