Mederos was born in 1992 in Santa Clara, Cuba, and began his formal training at the Leopoldo Romañach art school before being accepted into San Alejandro in Havana, the country's most prestigious academy. He grew up on the Old Masters, Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Velázquez, and that education still governs how he builds a canvas: slowly, structurally, with light doing the work.
At twenty-two he left the island on his own. Within weeks of arriving in the United States his paintings were picked up by a gallery, and the work has since traveled to Los Angeles, New York, Santa Fe, London and France, entering private collections across several continents.
The early paintings were portraits, straightforward and academic. What changed everything was the decision to paint what sits in front of them. In the Obscura series a sheet of bubble wrap covers the entire surface, every cell given its own curve, its own reflection, its own faint distortion of whatever lies beneath. It is not printed and not collaged. It is oil paint, applied over months.
The reward is in the distance you choose. Up close, the illusion admits itself: you can read the strokes, the wet edges, the places where a highlight was pushed into place with a single touch. Step back and the evidence disappears. The surface tightens, the plastic hardens, and what should be impossible on a flat canvas becomes something you want to reach out and press.
