Rachel Valdés Camejo

Cuban visual artist who develops her work through different artistic manifestations including painting, sculpture, installation, and photography.

She graduated with honors from the National Academy of Fine Arts "San Alejandro" in Havana (2006-2010), where she subsequently taught various workshops and lectures to students.

She is the author of important public art projects, some of which were developed at different Havana Biennials (2012, 2015, 2019), such as "Happily Ever After," a representative work of the curatorial project "Behind the Wall" in 2012, or "Blue Cube," installed on El Malecón in 2015, or also "Immersion" exhibited at the 2019 Havana Biennial, a work that was acquired and permanently installed as cultural heritage of the city by Historian Eusebio Leal.

Her work is part of private and public collections, including The Donald Rubin Foundation, New York, The Rockefeller Brothers Foundation, New York, Pérez Museum (PAMM) Miami, Fundación Calosa, Mexico.

In 2016, Rachel received the 1st prize, awarded by The Rockefeller Brothers Foundation and The Cuban Art Fund, where she exhibited her first public art work in New York City, titled "The Beginning of the end." It received great acclaim and had significant impact; it was on display for two months in Times Square plaza, and it is estimated that more than 2 million people passed by the work. She has realized other important public works thanks to other awards and grants, such as in Utah, USA, Vermont, USA, or in the Pyrenees, Spain.

Rachel lives and works between Havana and Madrid.

Her work calls for contemplation and reflection on how we conceive of a given space; it invites direct dialogue between the work and the viewer. In her three-dimensional work, she uses materials such as laminated mirrors, glass, and polished stainless steel.

"I have always been interested in investigating perpetual and sensorial questions. Many times I aim to distort and reinterpret an environment through different elements placed in function of a space; I seek new ways of inhabiting and observing what surrounds us. I am attracted to the idea of placing the viewer as a fundamental part of the work, providing a state of presence, recognition, and contemplation, creating a dialogue between the subject, the object, and the environment. Where I make reference to the disjunction between the different realities that make up human existence, the mental and the physical, the objective and the subjective."

"I am interested in creating scenarios that lead to dialogue, whether visual or spiritual, between the being, the object, and the space surrounding it, and to provide through these other perceptual versions of the existing reality itself. The experience of seeing oneself reflected within an environment is something that calls my attention greatly. I believe that the repetition of an element or its reflection evokes a contemplative act of reflection toward the past and the present; it is like a materialization of the passage of time. For me, these emerging scenarios are like a kind of new landscapes, limbos, mystical places, and apparently infinite."

Rachel Valdés commits herself to aesthetic experience without considering a single way of assuming it, since for her everything can lead to reflection, to emotions and feelings whether we face a work formalized in two or three dimensions with fullness of codes, contemplative, retinal, or if we are enveloped in a labyrinth of images, fixed or in motion and even unfinished, in full process of development, assumed both from the ephemeral and circumstantial as from the imperishable nature of her materials.

For her, it is essentially about activating the greatest quantity of symbols, of fostering the appearance of new senses and meanings amid a growing universe of increasingly attractive images, irradiated by all possible means and that do not necessarily lead to enjoyment, to the ordering and existence of an open, plural, transparent way of thinking. She turns to all that responds to her intellectual, affective, and cultural interests: one of her main instruments is the search for specific, specialized information about new artistic processes, the technical possibilities offered by advances in science and what is happening in art from one end of the planet to the other.

Her academic training was sufficiently democratic so as not to assume obligations within a specific genre but rather to explore the most varied paths of creation. In two words: to feel free, never bound to a single technical or expressive position. Rachel has traversed vast territories of painting, drawing, and photography and, with equal strength and passion, explores the geography of sculpture, objects, and installations, approaching the latter as a sum, a compendium of investigations and inquiries about perception and the correlation between subject and creation, author and viewer, intimacy and circumstantial environments. That is, that which exalts the labyrinths and dictates of the mind to the point of delirium, allowing her an emotional translation of her intellectual aspirations as an expression "of the existential phenomena of human beings, of their physical and ideological matter…," as she has stated on occasion.

Rachel thus confirms a conscious will to grant the viewer the possibility of living experiences similar to hers, whether trained in the universe of art or not. She does not act as a magician, does not become a demiurge, a visible genius capable of monopolizing possible attentions but quite the opposite: her invisibility is essential to sharing experiences by integrating into the creation-exhibition-reception system of art. She is merely an instrument (not "the hand of God" as was once believed) an intangible one, committed to operating brushes, metals, glass, oils, wood, mirrors, fabrics, acrylics, cameras, and video projectors, lights, in countless works and projects. Hidden today by the tangle of high technology and spectacles that attempt to drain any manifestation of human sensitivity and perception of content, emotions and feelings surface in each of her works, are highlighted until they monopolize all possible attention. They attract from the very moment they are installed: she does not agree with the idea of delivering to the viewer something immovable and closed, as she prefers to face the risks of participation, of complicity almost from the moment of its production and assembly. She is seen there at the site attending to every minimal detail, outlining processes, fixing the framework of delicate and complex structures, living that rich social experience as an effective antidote against any sign of isolation, estrangement.

Since 2019 she is in a relationship with Alejandro Sanz. Rachel was married to a prestigious Catalan lawyer during the five years she lived in Barcelona, a relationship from which her son Max was born.