JAMA - José Andrés Mato

José Andrés Mato Alonso, known as JAMA, was born on August 26, 1974, in Güines, in the province of Havana, Cuba. He started drawing as a child: from the age of six his father took him to visit relatives and friends and, to keep him occupied, asked him to draw their portraits. In 1994 he enrolled at university to study Sciences and, surrounded by artists, poets, mathematicians, writers, musicians and biologists, changed to Geography, a shift that gave him a broader vision of nature and of his place in society. His style took shape under the influence of Aristotle and his book of logic, the Organon.

JAMA's work is often associated with that of Jean-Michel Basquiat, and he is considered a Post Neo-Expressionist painter: art that looks outsider, or primitive, mixed with urban graffiti. He is also associated with Pop art in the line of Andy Warhol. He describes himself as the creator of a theory of geometric implosion and explosion, in which the decomposition of form goes beyond the forms known to humans and anarchy and order are inseparable.

He left Cuba in 2002, spending two months in Costa Rica, where he took part in various exhibitions, before arriving in Miami on August 19 of that year. In Miami, amid the mixture of artistic tendencies of a cultural city, he co-founded the group Art Factory with other artists. After a year and a half he left the group to join ART+ in Coral Gables, the gallery of the collectors and dealers Devra Arman and Jean Bernard, where he had his first solo exhibition in 2005 and later shared the walls with Andy Warhol, Salvador Dalí, Georges Braque, Keith Haring, Clyde Butcher, Roberto Matta, Guy Le Baube and Arman, among others.

By 2008 JAMA was director of Renee Gallery in Little Havana, Miami. On January 1, 2010, he moved to Naples, Florida, welcomed and assisted by his friend John Parke Wright IV. In 2011 he received the Face Award in the art category in Southwest Florida and took part in the exhibition Cuba on My Mind at the Von Liebig Art Center, organized by Joel Kessler and Jack O'Brien. His work is held in New York, Miami, London, Cannes, Nice, Paris, Tel Aviv and other cities.