Installation, 2009, Wood, Metal, Fabric, Plastic, Soil, 200 x 90 x 30 cm. Symbolicarium, a solo show by cuban-born artist Carlos Pérez Vidal featured the vernissage at Caribbean Court Hotel in Vero Beach. The event was presented by World Art Projects. The exhibition feature twenty five artworks, including installations, paintings, retablos and photographs with catalogue.
Michelle Genz, text about Carlos Pérez Vidal. 
His artwork combine painting, carving and sculpture with the use of written words and phrases. At times, Pérez Vidal’s exhibitions involve performance, as in one entitle “Smoking the History”, in which he wrote the words in charcoal on an adobe american indian fireplace, as smoke Cuban cigar from an ancestral afro-pipe and connected with afrocuban guaguanco music as a ritual. His focus on ancient myths and icons, spirituality, human conditions and utopias can provoke reflections on art-historical parodies, politics, opportunity and artistic expression.
Carlos Pérez Vidal at around the age of six, his best friend’s father, a well-known ceramicist, remarked on Carlos’ talent to his parents, and urged then to send him to art school. “Every single day when I finished school, I would do two things: play baseball and do artwork – sculpture, drawing, painting and ceramic, together with my best friend Oscar”. he recalls. His parents support him with art education. Carlos was nurtured by the same art teacher through the age of 10, then passed the test to move to the next level of elementary art school, and later the next in the famous San Alejandro Academy of Visual Art, and then in the National Art School of Havana. Eventually he gained admission to the prestigious Superior Art Institute of Havana. By the time he graduated in 1989, he was already very active in the Cuban Renaissance, the avant-garde movement in Cuba. “ It was a great new Cuban art revolution,” say Pérez Vidal. He was founder member of Group La Campana, involved with conceptual and performance art. “ Our outstanding Generation were trying to democratize the culture,” he say. By the lately 1980s and the early 1990s, censorship of artists had driven many of the most intellectual among then to emigrate to Europe, Canada, Mexico and the United States.
Pérez Vidal, Patty, Mechelle Genz and Victoria Palacios.
In 1993, while Pérez Vidal was a professor at the National School of Visual Art of Havana, he won a visa through the Clinton Administration to come to U.S. By then, his works had earned 16 national awards, and he had multiple exhibits in the National Museum. These were heady times for artistic activity. “It was a marvelous era for my generation in the 1980s and early 1990s. We wanted to improve artistically everything in Cuba, so we created social projects full of new ideas.” “Art education in Cuba is among of the best in the world,” he says. “ Cuba art school taught us to be resourceful and creative. We don’t have much art material there. But we were very inventive with recycle sources.”
Carlos Studio.
Photographer Tom McCarthy Jr. at Carlos Pérez Vidal Studio.
Silvia Medina and Victoria Palacios from World Art Projects.
Pérez Vidal strongly urges an end to the U.S. embargo of Cuba. “ It’s an inappropriate and inhuman law that from the beginning to the present never helped the Cuban people, only gives power to the government.”
Alma Mater, 2009, Photograph.
Vernissage view, Silvia Medina, Susan Abello and Carlos Pérez Vidal.
Carlos Pérez Vidal, Karl M. Steene and Mrs. Steene. He continues creating to this day to incessantly offering viewers with a mystical and atmospheric art work. “Some of my artworks metaphorically are connected between profane and divine, all constructed with a poetical halo".
The Vernissage food was provided by Cuban chef-owner Felix Fajardo of the restaurant Felix's Place.
Vernissage view.
Vernissage view. Run Rennick and Mrs. Rennick and Carlos Perez Vidal. 
Sam Baita, Victoria Palacios, Tom McCarthy Jr. and Carlos Pérez Vidal.
Vernissage view.
The Thinker, Installation, 2009 (Detail), Carving, Acrylic on Wood, 150 x 150 cm.
Article by Michelle Genz. The article in V.B. 32963 Magazine, pages 17, 18 and 19, September 17, 2009.
The Son of Carpenter Contemplation, 2009, Retablo, 140 x 90 x 6 cm.
