Gabriel Sanchez: Lamparilla

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce Gabriel Sanchez: Lamparilla, the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery, on view from January 10 – February 28, 2026. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, January 10 from 4:00–7:00 p.m.

“Lamparilla” is the name of a famous street in Old Havana, and it also references the small oil lamps people rely on during the frequent apagones or blackouts. Symbolically, it carries the idea that every Cuban holds their own inner light—sometimes literal, sometimes internal—despite darkness, scarcity, and repression. In Lamparilla, Gabriel Sanchez draws inspiration from friends, family members, and journalistic and documentary sources to examine the impacts of suppression, longing, separation, exile, and diaspora.

Through intimate portraits, documentary street scenes, and a sculptural installation, Sanchez foregrounds humanity, vulnerability, and the quiet resilience embedded in daily experience. The exhibition speaks to the physical and psychological struggles that impact contemporary life in Cuba and pays tribute to the brave acts of survival against the weight of repression, scarcity, censorship, and fear under an oppressive state.

The exhibition juxtaposes refined figurative oil paintings of friends and family in moments of vulnerability, contemplation, and forward-looking reflection with “sketch” paintings memorializing the July 11, 2021, protests, also known as “11J.” Painted in rapidly executed burnt umber oil washes on unstretched canvas, the paintings recall the immediacy of documentary footage. The images feel hot, unstable, and alive, capturing moments the state sought to erase. Their austerity echoes the material scarcity of the island, rejecting luxury in favor of urgency and truth.

An immersive installation of five standing lamps made from welded chain and arranged on wooden pallets evokes both raft and island. Each lamp becomes a figurative body—its height suggesting a member of a family or community—while the coiled chain stems signal the constraints endured by Cubans today.

A warm glow illumines hand-painted shades depicting more scenes of repression, confinement, and suffocating heat. Together, the lamps reference the “interior life” of Cuba: the hidden spaces where truth is protected, obscured, or punished.

Gabriel Sanchez's Lamparilla offers an urgent yet hopeful gesture: an insistence that these stories are seen, and that art can serve as witness, archive, and call to action. Through this, Sanchez continues to ignite storytelling in his paintings and sculptures to share the importance of solidarity, courage, and visibility.