Art Review

Mónica

Mónica and the Mountain

Notes on the vital poetics of Cuban artist Mónica Batard

April 27th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

es en Vea el original en español Go to English Version

Mónica has summited something enormous today. And I am probably just as happy as she is, as happy as the people who love her most. Whether she shares it is her call. I want to share this joy by retrieving some words I once wrote about her work, when she was just beginning at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Americas.

Mónica was born in Cabaiguán, Sancti Spíritus, in 1979. She has lived and worked in Miami for several years now. She hasn't devoted much time lately to her artistic practice, because she can finally see within reach —through certain steep and abrupt shortcuts— what she wants and needs most. Let us briefly go back.

Taken as a whole, her work bears the imprint of the family environment that shaped her as an artist and as a person. It is also a clear reflection of how the blows of reality inscribe themselves on her inner states.

Mónica spent nearly all her life in a world marked by craft, surrounded by the women of her family, bound together by a shared vocation: hand weaving. The magic of crochet was, for a time, her means of survival. Its execution is at once creative and deeply calming. The completion of these laborious, absorbing pieces tends to yield feelings of satisfaction and personal fulfillment.

Unlike anyone else of her generation, Batard is not immune to the spiritual erosion of living inside a precarious political and economic reality. Emigrating at a certain age, under deeply complex personal circumstances, has channeled an artistic practice that —beyond offering an aesthetic experience— has allowed her to exorcise traumatic and disruptive chapters of her life.

From the Conscious series, Untitled, 2023
Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 72 inches

Formally, her work invokes concrete art and geometric abstraction. She works with simple forms —straight lines, circles, triangles— and the meticulous exercise of near-mechanical, supposedly predictable patterns is accompanied by a radiant chromatic range. She brought with her a palette she mixes with the exacting instinct of Caribbean alchemy. These notes of color divide the corridors bordering the gardens of a tedious city, threaded by paths that lead nowhere and betray the pernicious logic of one-way streets. Mónica walks them, her attention fixed on the flowerbeds.

It is not difficult to find in her pieces the trace of warm episodes from her childhood and adolescence —the fabrics woven by her mother, her aunts, her grandmothers, her friends and companions as they turned over their anxieties, or savored better memories. That memory is today a handhold for bearing a present that remains deeply uncertain.

They are, in equal measure, exercises in emotional evasion. The near-enigmatic repetition of geometric patterns, driven by a serial combination of motifs and complementary colors, replicates the stereotyped behaviors of captive animals suffering from stress and anxiety —disorders that manifest, above all, in artificial environments that offer no room for natural conduct.

What would the appropriate ecosystem be for a recently emigrated woman who remains, literally and umbilically, tethered to the reasons she left? A new environment is always demanding, fertile ground for anguish, uncertainty and fear. Art is a reckless response. It springs from the full accumulation of experience across a life. It is often bittersweet.

Finding artistic expressions as sincere as this one has everything to do with the context in which they are made. These are pieces that provoke in me a deep empathy, that I feel real in my bones, that lift from her the weight of a thousand problems.

If there is anything I respect in this life, it is constancy and will —even when they arrive driven by very different reasons. How glad I am for her. And she knows it.