Jan Valdés Téllez

JAN VALDÉS TÉLLEZ (Havana, Cuba, 1979).
"The garden next door", 2025.
Oil on canvas.
Attached certificate of authenticity issued by the artist.
Signed in the lower right area. Signed, dated and titled on the back.
Measurements: 130 x 162 cm.
In the words of Jan Valdés "The garden next door is always greener" -a familiar phrase that encapsulates a silent longing, a voyeuristic impulse and the structural projection of lack. Jan Valdés Téllez adopts the adage not as a path to the ideal, but as an entry point to artifice itself.
Far from literal botanical motifs, El jardín de al lado unfolds as a theater of images in which desire remains in a state of suspension. The figures do not act-they present themselves. Sometimes with the haughtiness of those who know they are being watched, sometimes with the vulnerability of those who suspect they do not belong to their own environment. What separates "our garden" from the other is not the earth, but a thin membrane of fiction.
In El jardín de al lado, the eponymous piece of the series, Jan Valdés composes an ambiguous scene where the figurative coexists with deconstructive visual structures. The lines of the ground and the vegetal background refer to a grid that limits the space: a hidden geometry, an architecture of enclosure. Subtly, one perceives an echo of constructivist Mondrian, here transformed into a fence, an emotional fence. Abstraction becomes a border, and the natural becomes a social structure. In this game of invisible borders, Valdés Téllez proposes a garden that does not liberate: it contains. In a more synthesized form, in this work can be seen part of the core thesis of his poetics: the counterpoint with the History of Art and the dialogue between figuration and abstraction.
This painting operates as mental tableaux: scenographically charged, chromatically exuberant but contained, evoking both compositional classicism and a destabilizing psychic modernity. Valdés Téllez's gaze-deeply figurative yet discreetly critical-does not dwell on what we desire, but on the very condition of desiring.
The neighbor's garden here is neither Eden nor ruin; it is a reflective surface, a performative territory, a metaphor for all that we imagine we lack. As in the most powerful works of Baroque painting or the most acute psychological portraiture, no solace is granted to the viewer-only the nagging suspicion that perhaps he or she is looking from the wrong side of the fence. The painting maintains the author's own anatomical sharpness, but the entire visual field vibrates with a latent tension: the scenic confronts the compositional artifice".
The artist Jan Valdés Téllez studied at the renowned San Alejandro National Academy of Fine Arts in Havana, one of the most prestigious institutions in the Cuban artistic field. After completing his studies in 2004, he began a prolific professional career that has combined pictorial practice with sustained teaching, consolidating himself as an active figure in the Cuban contemporary art scene.
Since his beginnings, Valdés Téllez has developed an oeuvre marked by the exploration of the everyday, approached from a critical and poetic point of view that is manifested both in his figurative compositions and in his more symbolic approaches. His production has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions, both in his native country and internationally.
Among his most outstanding solo exhibitions are "Una mirada cubana" (Stoa Gallery, Estepona, Malaga, 2024), a show that reaffirms his presence in the Spanish art circuit, and "En la nada todo cabe" (2020), presented at the Esto no es un café gallery, in Havana, where he deployed a visual reflection on the ambiguity of emptiness and memory. In previous years, he has had other relevant exhibitions such as "Por el lado más salvaje de la vida" (Por el lado más salvaje de la vida) (Centro de Desarrollo de las Artes Visuales, 2015), "Inventario" (Fundación Ludwig, 2009), and "Extraordinario de la vida ordinaria" (Galería 23 y 12, 2008), all of them in Cuba. Likewise, his work has been present in international exhibition spaces since early stages of his career, as evidenced by "Un poco de todo" (Murcia, Spain, 2005).
At the same time, he has participated in important group exhibitions that have contributed to the international projection of his work. Among them are "Mi Pekado" (Studio Arriaza 11, Madrid, 2024), "Héroes y villanos" (Centro de Cultura Contemporánea Cárcel Vieja, Murcia, 2022), "Por unos dólares más" (Toronto Art Fair, 2008), and "Anuario de pintores noveles" (Galerías Fivars, Alicante, 2008). He has also been part of significant group exhibitions in Cuba, such as the III Salón "Panorama 42" at the Wilfredo Lam Gallery (2006), and the I Salón Internacional de San Alejandro (2003).