The Orlando Museum of Art presents work by Francisco Masó, a Cuban-born, Afro-LatinX conceptual artist who graduated from Havana’s Instituto Superior de Arte and the experimental Behavior Art School. Working in photography, painting, performance and installation, he examines the covert surveillance, repression and unspoken violence that the source describes as part of daily Cuban life. His focus is the normalization of control, recorded and hidden in ordinary gestures and objects, and the way citizens learn to decipher coded systems of oppression hidden in plain sight.
A central subject is the Cuban government’s distribution of striped polo shirts to members of the Seguridad del Estado, or State Security. The source states that these officers act as plainclothes agents during protests and rallies, intimidating dissidents and making arrests, and that they receive civilian clothing through a government-issued incentive package called a módulo. Imported in large quantities, the high-end striped shirts help agents blend into crowds, yet the disguise also makes the secret police visually identifiable, so the polos now signify surveillance, intimidation and the threat of detention. In his ongoing series Aesthetic Register of Covert Forces, begun in 2017, Masó sources documentary photographs of street arrests in Cuba from the internet, extracts the shirt patterns and paints them as geometric abstractions recalling the Californian Hard-edge painting of the 1950s and 1960s. Scaled roughly to the chests of the men who wore the shirts, the paintings function as anonymous portraits, implying violence rather than illustrating it.
In the gallery, the artist has built an immersive environment inspired by Cuban public demonstrations. It first appears celebratory, with purple walls in a Quixotic plum hue, warm midday lighting, a musical score and staging that evoke a festival, before a more sinister reality emerges through striped flags, paper chains and his paintings. At the center, on a white pedestal, stands a golden biombo inspired by Japanese folding screens, carrying surveillance-camera-type images of peaceful protesters and a painted gladiola associated with the dissident group Las Damas de Blanco. The installation is titled The Coronation of Gladiolus, dated 2026, referencing grand historical paintings such as Jacques-Louis David’s The Coronation of Napoleon, and substituting the dignity and resilience of ordinary protesters for imperial authority.
Press release issued by Orlando Museum of Art:
https://omart.org/news/states-of-control-and-patterns-of-oppression/
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