[Music] when we were growing up there was always like this uh this world of all these cool dudes with Tuxedos and and the go- go girls in the background you know laughing if you remember that show so it's just like it's like you didn't have a choice but to be influenced by the cool it was always there you know around 1999 I wanted to start doing my art and painting I at that point I was in the corporate world I did sales marketing real estate I was was sitting in my living room one evening listening to a collection it's like a little cigar box with some CDs and it was called I am time was an anthology of Cuban music which my dad had given me while I was looking at this painting that I had done around 1993 when I had no idea that I was going to be doing this fulltime and it was like a pop art style that I had done and that's when the kind of little light bulb went off I said you know no one's ever done all these Cuban themes in a pop art style and that's kind of like the spark that really got me going and that first exhibit that I did which was like in January of 2000 was a collection of very Cuban traditional things but in a pop art style and you know and again the rest is history kind of that was like the first [Music] Domino welcome to the Vault it's kind of like a Speak Easy but it's for art instead of for liquor because you can't it's nondescript from the outside uh you can't really tell but definitely when you walk through that little vestibule and you walk inside it has that wow factor cuz nobody's expecting the visual Once you walk through the door the coolness of this venue is that the history of what it used to be where you know the Brinks armored trucks would bring the things that they would pick up whether it was cash money or gold bars and they would pass them through these little things and and that's all still here you know the bulletproof glass some of them mat you'll if you go through it I don't know what the story behind them is but there's bullet holes and some of the bulletproof glass um so each room has its own little vibe from here on in there's a couple of pieces from the new exhibit but the all the other rooms basically contain remnants of exhibits pass you know 25 years worth of doing art and shows and everything and then there's inevitably there's a few that are that stay behind waiting for their right home and uh so I had to yank them out and bring in here to fill in all the amount of wall space that we have we have the actual Vault um with this door that weighs more than a house but um it's where the bul of the the character of this place comes in and then now yeah we're inside the actual Vault uh the namesake of the gallery we put some of the racer images in here and then we also have in the corner you'll see a actual safes that they used to use to store gold bars this new collection uh whoas which is fingerprint in Spanish um is specific things that I selected that have directly impacted my life or left A Life Lesson or something that influenced me as the years have gone on just to kind of capture the fact that you know it is things that have left an imprint on my life and it's actually not not size-wise but it's my actual uh thumb print in all of them depending on the piece you know played around with the placement and stuff like that but it's it's visible in all of them in some way shape or form these paintings although they have less color than my older stuff it it they actually have more layers because you know it's just it's a buildup of of things to end up with the final piece but um I didn't want the other ones had more color but they were more flat and in this case I wanted to add more depth to it so I kind of did like that shadowing effect and when I was finished which wasn't part of the original plan it turned out that it does look like it's like a a metal sculpture floating my mom had uh saved a little sketch a little Doodle that I had done when when I still lived in Cuba almost been like 2 and a half 2 years old and she had kept it with all her stuff so when I found that and I had that little piece of paper you know put away and then when I started this I go there's no way I could do everything without starting with the start the actual starting point and and there may have been others but that's the one that's there so then I just took that little original sketch and I depicted it as a full-blown uh painting uh which is really you know like when people ask me how long have you been drawing how long have you been painting it's like there's the answer that long it's kind of like the the natural transition uh or the segue from this cuz the next thing is yeah we you know it's called Patria exilio liberta um you know we left lived in left Cuba came to Miami at that time and we were here for a while and then ended up in in New York and everything that that stood for at that time you know it's you know it wasn't only that we were in New York but it it was the process of Liberty and freedom I tried to kind of capture that whole diaspora in in one one piece I wanted to capture how how much TV was an influence uh to everyone in the in the 60s 50s 60s 7s because all this programming popped up and a and in a and TV as a concept was like a new thing these images were like in your house you know and then you would turn on the TV and all those shows that we grew up watching ing were original in every sense because there was no predecessor to them we would turn on the TV and there was all this coolness you know cuz it it was like it was the Beatles it was Elvis it was Tom Jones it was Playboy it was Dean Martin it was Frank Sinatra we had just coolness abounded this is uh my second Batman I did a a pop art Batman some years ago more pop art and um but my Batman was Adam West you know in the 60s you know and then this is actually me in 1966 dress as Batman so and what's weird about this is like you look at the little date and it's in April so it wasn't even Halloween I was just batmanning for the sake of Being Batman you it's funny because depending on who the person is they'll relate to one piece more than the other you know like some people like love that station wagon one cuz they oh man I remember when we so they can relate the Rolling Stones James Bond everybody could kind of relate to their own memories uh of that specific uh specific subject things that we may not think about on a daily basis things may no longer be a part of my life today but they were at one point but it still leaves a mark it still leaves an emper