(…) Osy Milian surprises me every day. Before beginning a new project, she studies and researches. Her concerns are others, her context has changed; her former cosmos, legitimated in a contemporary visual panorama characterized by plurality and versatility, has discovered new artistic frontiers. Her pictorial work, measurable in solo shows as Frágil (Fragile, 2010), Sin Retorno (Without Return, 2011) and Arte Cubano Joven (Young Cuban Art, 2012), has a distinctive vocabulary. The originality of her canvases stems from the argument she displays (imaginary linked to the adolescent universe) and in the way she achieves to solve it (from a childlike perspective). Her reflections then turn around the representation of a social group of which she takes part. Her characters are determined from the borrowings she accomplishes from Japanese iconography (anime and manga), the design and creators of Cuban pop (Umberto Peña and Raúl Martínez) and Japanese pop (Takashi Murakami and Yoshinoto Nara). On her canvases, chromatic planimetry, an excellent drawing, the use of strident tonalities, power of synthesis and formal depuration, elements of support which communicate to the spectator her most intimate experiences and establish dialogues on topics such as sex, drugs, consumerism, isolation, rebellion and so on.
Currently, her inner self is generating symbolic functions and fictitious universes that are essentially gestures that implicitly carry abstract processes. Osy is not the same anymore, the umbilical cord that tied her to painting—an expression she defends—is broken; an incision that allowed her to combine another system of knowledge linked with the relation existing among the pictorial tradition, technology and science. Her artistic paradigm has changed.
Eridani (2015), an exhibition held in the gallery Artis 718 of the Cuban Fund of Cultural Assets, announces us a new stage in her path. In it we could notice the way the artist is interested in sharing with the spectator part of her history, her more personal activities and her knowledge on history of art. Likewise, she avoids her work to be cataloged in some specific movement or trend; she moves through diverse languages without fear; rigidity upsets her. Her statements from painting have achieved an individual and unmistakable seal for her work, elements that in these moments make it possible to widen her exploratory horizons. To that end, she experiences the strategy of work in group with Thriangle (Osy Milian & Alejandro R. Rosell), a visual platform created in 2014. Immerse in this multidisciplinary process, the artist has decided to build in the gallery an imaginary landscape based on the representation of the limits and the conventional possibilities with art.
(…) With a different concept for the Cuban art panorama and as part of her Degree Thesis of the Higher Institute of Arts (ISA), Osy Milian accomplishes in Servando Gallery the exhibition id1428115017 (Havana, April 2016). Here the investigations are not the same. She is now interested in reflecting on aspects as what is private and what is public and their imbrication in contemporaneity. Likewise, through each of the pieces she explores and deals with her ideas on art-life relationship and on painting reflecting about itself, ideas which make it possible to undress her nature and her creative process.
The exhibition is pure gesture. Osy has placed the works arbitrarily. Each one is located as it was conceived: on the floor, on a piece of furniture or on easel, drying before a fan. The curatorial project, apparently disordered and incoherent, establishes a speech very close to the creations by Japanese artist Parker Ito and to the works made by Grupo Puré in the 1980s. The viewer completes and grants meaning to most of the presented pieces (…)