Yornel J. Martínez Elías
“VERSO/ REVERSO”
Yornel J. Martínez Elías’s work is marked by a fascination with the relationships that emerge between text and image. For this lightbox intervention in Brussels, Yornel explores typographic strategies that alter the order of discourse. In Verso/reVerso, text becomes spatial rather than temporal. The image takes on a double significance: what is read and what is seen come together to form a text that invites “new readings.” This urban intervention finds a middle ground between design and conceptual art, where the idea precedes the image in its state of premature weightlessness.
Yornel Martínez Elías, a 2007 graduate of Instituto Superior de Arte, is a Havana-based artist whose work spans drawing, painting, installations, objects, calligrams, and public interventions. It explores the intersections of the literary and visual realms, often drawing attention to underexplored archives of Caribbean visuality and thought, collective learning, and the emancipatory potential of artistic imagination. Yornel co-founded P-350 (alternative publishing) with Omar Pérez and founded the self-managed Ediciones Asterisco.
