Rising

Oil on Canvas. Unframed  39"x32" / 100cm x 80cm

This painting by Cuban Artist Maikel Benítez, unfolds as a quiet rite of becoming. Emerging from darkness, a young girl stands crowned with vivid flowers, her presence both tender and resolute. Her arms fold inward in a gesture of self-protection, yet her gaze remains steady, carrying a gravity that feels ancestral rather than childlike. The single guacamaya wing—rendered in luminous golds and ochres—introduces a powerful symbolic register. In Latin American cosmologies, the macaw is a bearer of solar energy, vitality, and sacred communication; here, its solitary wing does not promise flight, but signals initiation. It marks a moment of awakening, where inherited strength begins to surface within vulnerability.

The contrast between the radiant wing and the surrounding darkness heightens the painting’s emotional charge, suggesting resilience rooted in lineage and memory. This is not an image of innocence untouched, but of inner power quietly forming. The overall feeling is one of suspended transformation—a threshold where fragility, protection, and ancestral force coexist, and where the act of rising begins from within rather than above.