Born November 23, 1920 in Cidra, Matanzas, Cuba, Rafael Soriano initiated his artistic studies at Havana’s Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro, graduating in 1943 as Professor of Painting, Drawing and Sculpture. He then returned to Matanzas where he taught visual arts for close to two decades. There he founded and directed the Escuela de Bellas Artes de Matanzas, the second most important art school in Cuba.  Settled into exile in 1962 living in Miami until his death in 2015. He worked as a graphic designer and occasionally taught, first at the Catholic Welfare Bureau, and later at the Cuban Cultural Program of the University of Miami. Soriano avoided vernacular themes which dominated Cuban art from its emergence with the first Vanguard in the mid-twenties. His work proceeded along the paths of geometric abstraction during the 1950's and was part of the Ten Concrete Geometric painters group but by the late 1960s, Soriano’s work took a radical turn, through a highly refined technique, he became a master of luminosity, of the pictorial metaphor and of the metaphysical language of forms. In his amazing and highly complex images, light acts as both form and content. Since his first exhibition in 1947 in Havana, Rafael Soriano’s work has been exhibited in numerous important museums most recently at the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston.