Nara Roesler presents the exhibition The Decorator’s Home, a solo show by Cuban artist Marco A. Castillo. A member for decades of the Los Carpinteros collective, where he worked alongside Alexandre Arrechea and Dagoberto Rodríguez Sanchez, since 2017 he has devoted himself exclusively to his own work, in which he reflects on aspects of Cuban culture and society through design and the applied arts. After presenting the exhibition La Casa Del Decorador / The Decorator’s Home in the United States (2019), Cuba (2019), and Mexico (2024, where it occupied a modernist house), the project arrives in Brazil. Castillo’s research embraces the design, art, and architecture of Latin America as a whole, which is why the Domschke house, designed by Vilanova Artigas, was chosen to host the artist in Brazil. The exhibition runs from April 8 to 28, 2026. It is curated by Livia Debbane.
The basis for the artist’s research is precisely the history of Cuban modernism developed between the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. During that period, Cuba experienced an effervescent cultural scene, with consequences especially in architecture and design. As a result of this moment, a generation of designers and architects emerged who, while seeking to create new forms, connecting with the production of the main modernist avant-gardes, engaged in the search for a national identity, employing materials and techniques already very present in Cuban culture and society. The Cuban Revolution, beginning in 1959, initially represented for this generation the possibility of putting their ideas into practice on a much larger scale, as their research and discoveries began to be applied in political and state projects. However, from the 1970s onwards, due to the growing influence of the Soviet Union in the Caribbean country, models imported from that country began to predominate to the detriment of the local modernist aesthetic, which went into decline and came to be seen by the Cuban regime as “bourgeois taste.” This process culminated in the emigration of many of these creators and designers abroad, as well as the ostracism or destruction of their creations.
Works such as Maria Victoria, Ivan, and Córdoba also pay homage to some of these historical figures, using the same materials they employed. The reflections that accompany these creations, however, mainly reflect on the island’s political context. In the case of Córdoba, Castillo uses mahogany seats, a wood typical of Cuba and widely used in modernist furniture, and shapes them into a star, a symbol associated with the Cuban Revolution and widely used in propaganda associated with it.
The exhibition also brings together works from the Cadernos Ditadura series, in which the artist reflects on the symbolic meaning of this word. On book covers, he makes incisions in which he engraves letters that spell out the word Dictadura. For Castillo, this reflection is especially crucial when considering the system in which many Cubans grew up. His intention is to repeatedly invoke this word, to recall the experience of growing up under an authoritarian regime.
The exhibition will be hosted at Casa Domschke, a residence designed by Vilanova Artigas in 1974. In this way, the exhibition, in dialogue with the building, promotes reflections on Latin American modernism and the legacy it has left behind.