At the beginning of his career as an art student Ariel Cabrera Montejo had the experience of being in constant interaction with collectibles, artwork and documents relating to the collecting of historical memorabilia of Cuba. These documents transcended to him as rare and truthful testimony they guarded information that differed in many cases with the story of the struggle for independence in Cuba and promoted as such remains in force as the official story of a unilateral doctrine. It is then when the motivation to submit the history to a revision from the position of art emerges, and the proposal to take on the more traditional painting techniques to perform works whose historical stories in contrast with traditional narrative content of literature history, and retake the pictorial fact itself as a recording action that along time legitimized the image of men, doctrines and mores.
In his work he selects images taken from pre-established heritage documents to enter rough areas and aspects little touched by the cuban history, setting references relating to the beginnings of photography and its forms of dialogue with painting. Besides, he proposes scenarios about military events of the struggle for the independence of Cuba in stadiums 1868 - 1898, creating simultaneous events and assumptions historiographical dialogues which subject the history in general to scrutiny, where sarcasm, erotic-burlesque and ludic are present, in romantic struggles and intimate scenes shaped as a campaign notes and short stories. He makes an ideological deconstruction of hieratic images of solemn independence patriots or historical heroes (mambí) whose characters are recurring in each stage or battlefield, where the paradox is implicit, and the historical discourse is as an open approach between the truth and simulation. Using different impressionist techniques to hold a better dialogue of visual illusion in each context that he represents and gives more credibility to each scene, using pictorial references like Spanish school painting, Italian and American in some cases, and how these influenced greatly in the history of Cuban art in the colonial period.

Lives and Works in NY.