Dark Days

In Dark Days, one of the two exhibitions opening 2026 for Art Cube, Rafael La Madrid turns to nature not as a sweeping vista but as something closer, more granular, and quietly insistent. His attention settles on the small and the often overlooked, allowing fragments of the natural world to carry the weight of reflection and endurance.

A duet or trio of moss-covered rocks is treated with the care usually reserved for rare objects. Set upon red cloth, isolated against black grounds, and enclosed within ornate frames, these stones take on an almost reliquary presence. They function as reminders of the planet itself—of how life, in its most modest forms, persists by clinging to what appears inert. Moss spreads, breathes, and thrives upon stone, suggesting that vitality does not always announce itself loudly.

La Madrid’s landscape works extend this meditation through a different vantage point. The scenes unfold as if viewed from the mouth of a cave: a threshold where darkness frames an outward surge of flora and light. Rocks occupy the foreground, ambiguous in their role. They may be read as obstructions, or as markers signaling proximity to an opening—evidence that passage, however difficult, is possible.

Taken together, these images carry the weight of symbolic passage. They recall the dark night of the soul—an interior crossing often undertaken alone and with little to sustain oneself beyond resolve. Yet the artist resists depicting despair as an endpoint. Instead, he paints the promise of emergence. Even within the cave’s shadowed interior, which offers its own form of shelter, signs of life and illumination persist beyond reach but not beyond hope.

Dark Days marks the previous year which was shaped by uncertainty, loss, and misfortune. This exhibition becomes La Madrid’s way of acknowledging that passage while orienting himself toward light. What emerges is not a denial of darkness, but a recognition that endurance itself carries the possibility of arrival.