The Verse of Strangers, the solo exhibition by Cuban artist Elio Jesús Fonseca at EL PUENTE GALLERY, brings together a selection of works created over the past two years, where drawing, installation, and expanded printmaking converge as essential visual languages in his contemporary practice. This exhibition not only creates a dialogue between media but also proposes an emotional map of displacement—a fragmented space where the tensions, uncertainties, and revelations inherent to the migratory process are expressed. In this context, the fragility of human nature is not merely a central theme, but the very core from which the artist's poetic and visual universe is constructed.

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Fonseca understands creation as a way of translating the intangible: emotional imbalances, identity dilemmas, and the vulnerability that accompanies moments of transition. His works appear as fragments of an unfinished story, where what is seen—and what is sensed—speaks of what is lost, what is transformed, and what is rebuilt.

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As the artist himself states:
“The images in the works migrate from drawing to printmaking and from printmaking to painting, fragmenting and recomposing themselves in installation like a wanderer halfway along the road, far from home, with no clear idea of where he is going, encountering in his present epiphanies from the past, trying not to forget who he used to be, knowing that with every step, his identity is transmuted, suffers, and is enriched in unexpected ways.”

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With over a decade of experience, Elio Jesús Fonseca has established himself as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Cuban art. A graduate of the Vicentina de la Torre Academy of Arts (Camagüey, 2014) and the University of the Arts (ISA) in Havana (2019), his work has been featured in major international events such as the London Art Biennale, the Arte Laguna Prize in Venice, ARCO Madrid, and the Havana Biennial. He has received grants and distinctions from institutions such as the Royal Mint of Spain (Madrid) and the Académie des Beaux-Arts (Paris). He currently resides in Madrid while completing a Master’s degree in Printmaking and Graphic Design at the RCM-FNMT.

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The Verse of Strangers is, at its core, a visual meditation on the human condition in times of transition. Through an aesthetic of the fragment, Fonseca invites us to inhabit uncertainty, to face instability head-on, and to recognize that in fragility—that quality so often denied—there is also a form of resistance, of beauty, and of truth.