Francisco Masó is a Cuban-born, Afro-LatinX conceptual artist who graduated from Havana’s Instituto Superior de Arte and the experimental Behavior Art School (Cátedra Arte de Conducta). Using photography, painting, performance, and installation, he brings to light the covert surveillance, repression mechanisms, and the unspoken stories of violence that have become part of the daily Cuban landscape.
Masó examines the normalization of control through its repetition and concealment in everyday gestures and objects, recording them and encouraging citizens to decipher coded systems of oppression hidden in plain sight. A central focus of his work is documenting a well-known phenomenon in Cuba: the government’s distribution of striped polo shirts to members of the Seguridad del Estado, or State Security. These officers act as plainclothes agents during protests and rallies, intimidating dissidents, and making arrests.
Instead of official military uniforms, they receive civilian clothing through a government-issued incentive package called a “módulo.” Imported in large quantities, the high-end, striped polo shirts help these agents blend into civilian crowds. Ironically, this disguise has the opposite effect, as their shirts make the secret police visually identifiable. These polos now signify surveillance, intimidation, and the threat of imminent detention. Like warning signs, they indicate state violence. Cuban citizens often recognize this coded visibility instantly, while outsiders may see only ordinary clothing.
In his ongoing series, Aesthetic Register of Covert Forces, (2017- ), Masó sources documentary photographs of street arrests in Cuba from the internet, images often subject to disappearance. Masó extracts the shirt patterns and paints them as geometric abstractions that recall the Californian Hard-edge painting movement from the 1950s and 1960s, characterized by sharp lines, flat color fields, and precision. Each of his abstractions serves as a visual record of oppression and repression.
The paintings, roughly scaled to the chests of the men who wore the shirts, function as anonymous portraits, evoking bodies without depicting them directly. Violence is also implied rather than illustrated. Occasionally, Masó displays the original photograph alongside the painting, but when the original is withheld, viewers must imagine the missing scene. This way, the audience becomes complicit participants, reconstructing the hidden encounter between police and dissenting bodies. Masó transforms abstraction into an act of collective witnessing.
In the gallery, the artist has created an immersive environment inspired by Cuban public demonstrations. Initially, the installation appears celebratory, even carnivalesque, with bright, bold colors. Purple walls painted in an intense “Quixotic plum” hue, warm midday lighting, an immersive musical score, and staging evoke a festival or public ceremony. However, beneath this theatrical surface, a more sinister reality emerges: repression has entered the scene. Overhead, striped flags and paper chains hang like banners and latent reminders of oppression, while the artist’s paintings—reminders of covert officers—punctuate the scene.
In the middle of the gallery, on a white pedestal, like a monument within the scene, stands a golden biombo, inspired by Japanese folding screens. On its golden surface, two sets of images can be read simultaneously. Long strips of black-and-white surveillance camera-type images depict the march of peaceful protesters, while a giant painted gladiola spans the length of the screens at the bottom. The flower is associated with the Cuban dissident group Las Damas de Blanco (Ladies in White), founded by the wives and relatives of imprisoned political activists. These women march silently, dressed in white and brandishing gladiolus flowers as emblems of resistance. The gladiolus, derived from the Latin gladius, meaning “sword,” has historically symbolized courage, honor, and moral integrity.
Masó has titled the installation The Coronation of Gladiolus (2026), referencing grand historical paintings such as Jacques-Louis David’s The Coronation of Napoleon (1805-1807). He substitutes a moment of imperial authority and privilege with the dignity and resilience of ordinary protesters. Under clear skies and broad daylight, women wield flowers as symbolic weapons against the state’s apparatus. Through these symbols, Masó shines a bright light on a type of oppression that doesn’t operate in the darkness but openly, routinely, and ritualistically in public view. In this installation, surveillance is experienced as spectacle, and viewers assume the role of performers within the system. It is in that dissident space that conversation and change can take place.
