Esperanza Conde Rodriguez, or Pia as all her friends call her, lives almost totally isolated away from any urban settlement in a small wooden house. Her home is in a little inaccessible hamlet in the countryside of Villa Clara. She works the land together with her husband that is the daily means of support of the family. Also she has two children who help her in the fields. She is a woman with a singular expression and delicate smile, who receives the visitors sat down just like that, in the floor of the living room.
Pia has never received any artistic formation, but she has a very strong unconscious bond with art. She paints impulsively with any material that she finds close at hand and on any surface motivated by a strong emotional necessity. As she says: “I do have to paint; it doesn't depend on me, darling ... if I don't paint I can get crazy... When I paint I start getting into another world, I see one thing here and other there and I start to calm down... I see little heads that tell me: I want to go out! I want to go out! And I paint them”. Her motivations and inspiration sources are unknown; she doesn't know how to explain the reason why she paints neither what's the meaning of her drawings. She never knows exactly what is she going to paint until she already has the piece in front of her, and once the work is made, she gets detached emotionally of the work and she throws it in a corner. Even if she stores many works she grabs them all and burns them, because, according to her own words, it entertains her to see the colors of the flames. And she makes more space, so this way she can begin to paint again. In other cases, she cuts the drawings that she makes on cloths, a process that she alleges precedes the burn of her own works.
Although in her whole life she has only known the countryside, she has not been interested in painting the landscapes surrounding her, but she deals with her world from a more intimate and personal perspective. In her pieces she set free a number of unique characters, generally human figures that melt with each other and with all type of animals, creating complex living structures. Her representations show elements that have nothing to do with her reality, on the other hand come from a mystic world. There is no explanation for any of them or neither what they represent, and it's not of her interest to know, not even title her works. She paints on paper, on sheets, on pieces of old clothes, on boards, even in the walls of her house. She uses what she has available; watercolors, colored pencils, pens, and even bricks powder gridded by her, or dirt of different colors. Materials are not important for her but to take out of her head all those images that are gathered in her mind, to get rid of those beings that live inside her using any material in a sublime way.

• 2017. Cuba Outside. Galerie Hamer. Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
• 2017. Biz'Art - Biz'Art 2017. Biz'Art - Biz'Art. Le Vaudioux, France.
• 2017. Effect - Correction. La Fabrica de Arte Cubano. Havana, Cuba.