Jose Manuel Mesias approaches art as a quiet, ongoing excavation of memory, of time, of material, and of meaning. Raised in Havana during the analog slowness of the 1990s, Mesias developed a deeply personal relationship with objects, craftsmanship, and the poetics of the everyday. Early experiments with inherited tools became the foundation for a practice that resists categorisation, moving fluidly between painting, assemblage, and installation. Each piece carries the residue of process and intuition—unfinished, layered, and open to the accidental. For Mesias, art is less a fixed product than an active and evolving encounter, where clumsiness can be a strength, ambiguity a strategy, and silence a kind of truth.

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How has your upbringing or cultural heritage shaped the themes and techniques you explore in your art today?

Being born in Havana and growing up in the 90s gave most of my generation a delayed and extended relationship with the more analogical part of reality. The idea of traditional or vernacular crafts and popular wisdom is quite present in my work.

Can you pinpoint a single moment in your life when you realised art was not just a passion but your purpose? 

I would say that fortunately, it happened very early in my life. I soon knew that I should find a ‘way of life’ that would allow me to explore as many things as my interest would claim in a given moment. To inherit my dad’s carpentry-set-for-children (a typology of toys from the 50’s that today would pass a professional set of tools, one I could really use for making my first assemblages) would be one moment that really made me more serious about my practices at home, which before would be more of a children’s play.

How do you reconcile the tension between raw, innate creativity and the discipline required to master your craft?

I really care for the ‘untaught’ artists, and lately I have been learning more from this outsider world. I appreciate crafts, but it shouldn’t be a mantrap or a dogma. It is a really complicated issue. I am thankful for what I have learned at school, but I also respect my  ‘clumsiness’, which gives a certain peculiarity to my works. I also aspire to always have the clarity to solve or translate ideas in the proper medium, and sometimes that pushes me to learn new things or to collaborate with those who actually manage that craft. It is always a challenge.

Art is often chosen as a medium for its freedom. Why do you personally turn to art, rather than another form of expression? 

Art today can dissolve into many practices and disciplines. I don’t even care if it doesn’t look like art. I am not the best example for that type of transdisciplinarity anyway.

Does spirituality or a connection to something larger than yourself influence your creative process?

Sometimes the creative process can acquire a mystical quality. There are tautologies,  paradoxes and signals that are constantly coding the nature of one’s practice. The half of a found object from a decade ago can be suddenly found and give purpose to that waiting time on my shelf; a dream can finish the plot of a painting that has long been unfinished.

How do you reignite creativity during those inevitable periods of self-doubt or stagnation? 

I think those moments in my case are necessary or natural. I believe in silence…

Do you believe an artist's passion is something designed or a conscious choice? 

It could work in both ways. I know many brilliant artists who have started their practice late in their lives, which, of course, can be seen as destiny as well. Art chosen as a job or a  ‘practical’ practice, as a transaction, doesn’t really interest me.

How does your art engage with or comment on pressing contemporary issues—social, political, or environmental? 

I start from a personal and poetical exploration, and that inevitably speaks from the socio-political context I live in, that comes as a result. 

How important is it for viewers to understand the intended message of your work? Does ambiguity add value, or do you seek clarity in your expression?

I like that some contents be delivered. But I also don’t believe in a type of round, closed reading of my work. I like to be surprised with some interpretations that actually contribute to it. Some works aren’t a finished exploration; art is a medium to investigate and dig. At times, a shown work could be part of a process, an ongoing journey. I generally try to provide clues when they're essential to help the viewer relate. I believe in the possibility of my work being a vehicle for knowledge. Although I don't like to reveal my interpretation, the most intimate notion of a piece, if I know it at all. There are some works  I can't explain; they have been the means to try to understand something, and sometimes I don't succeed.

If you could communicate just one core message through your entire body of work, what would it be? 

Reality is more interesting than fiction. 

Can you take us through the evolution of an artwork, from that first spark of inspiration to the finished piece? 

There are images that "come down" intact, and I transmit them, and I generally use painting for this. There are other works that I can mull over for years, or worse, I can re-intervene on them even after having already exhibited them. In this last case, it happens in both main methodologies, the object-based and the pictorial: I can accumulate and classify all kinds of objects, certain that one day something will happen that connects them. Something similar happens in painting; I can work on a piece for a long Ame,  although painting doesn't take long; what takes time are the solutions, finding the structure of each piece. I can sketch in many cases. I enjoy the studio-like quality of many works. There can be scale studies of the finished work. I tend to do this more when I'm working on a certain type of narrative painting, like someone who proposes a dramaturgy and studies it through a script. On the other hand, there is another type of work that is more visceral,  more intuitive. I would say I operate through a trial-and-error method; the pieces grow with a certain inaccuracy that I prune along the way. Therefore, chance is fundamental,  and it can manifest itself in various ways, from an accident to something I hear on the street to the most pedestrian and insignificant thing.

Describe a piece you’ve created that has held the most emotional weight for you. What makes it significant? 

A double portrait of my grandparents. It is an idea from 2012, I took the photo for painting the portrait in 2013, the piece was painted early in 2024. I wish they could have seen it. 

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