(b Cidra, Matanzas, 23 Nov 1920). Cuban painter, printmaker and teacher, active in the USA. He graduated from the Academia de S Alejandro in Havana in 1942 and from that year until his departure from Cuba for Miami, FL, in 1962, he taught at the Escuela de Artes Pl?sticas in Matanzas. From 1950 to 1964 he painted geometric abstractions, a popular form among Latin American artists of his generation, for example Tension (1964; Miami, FL, priv. col., see 1987 exh. cat., p. 191). By 1970, however, he had developed a luminist style of painting under the influence of Roberto Matta, exploring the unconscious not through Surrealist dream imagery but by means of light as a symbol of creative energy and thought. For Soriano, light revealed the inner spaces of solids, as in the terrain in Furrows of Light (1980; Miami, FL, Lowe A. Mus.), or the head in Mercator's Dream (1981; Miami, FL, priv. col., see Pau-Llosa, 1987, p. 102). His first one-man exhibition was at the Lyceum in Havana in 1947, and he held an important exhibition at the Zea Museum in Medell?n, Colombia, in 1981.
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