In the twenty-four windows that make up this exhibition, Díaz has created a series of kaleidoscopic impressions which frame and capture varying images or the artist´s personal pathos in his struggle to breach the gap between artistic and spiritual isolation and the need to communicate with the outside world. Each Frame or Window mirrors the others as a series of overlays with their similar interior design inhabited by a solitary, reflective, prayerful and motionless protagonist. Quiet, stoic, and contemplative, the figure seems resigned to live with his uncertainties and the fact that social communication is, often times, not attainable. The use of muted reds, greens, blues, and whites infuse the paintings with an atmosphere combinig a deep seated feeling of melancholy along with spiritual reflection. Nevertheless, in Díaz, the portrayal of isolation never cascades into despair. In nearly every Window, the artist provides avenues of escape, doorways and smaller windows which seem to draw in light from the heavens. The melancholy of his spiritual identity. Faith in the world may be illusory, but faith in God and the universe is what motivates the artist´s creative impulse.

      Accordint to Díaz, he was drawn to painting as a by product of his being an only child living with his mother in New York. Art Became a way of inventing a world of extended familial relationships. Although the artist and his mother lived in a urban environment alongside millions of other Latinos, he remembers how difficult it was to really make friends in the projects. Perhaps, it was due to the harsh realities of the struggle to survive in a hostile environment which seemed to make communication so difficult. Paradoxically, the proximity of all those living together in the projects did not diminish the indifference that people had developed toward one another. he vividly recalls his early attempts to draw the face of God in pursuit of the father he didi not Know.

      If art, as seen in Díaz´s work. becomes a refuge from the pervasive social and economic uncertainties brought about by living in exile, it can, also, be seen as a vehicle for reconstructing and redefining a personal relationship with inherited cultural symbols and those accumulated in the process of transculturation. As such, the artist reveals to us, as we peer through his Windows, an assessment of the changing forms of his own cultural identity as person and as artist.

      For Díaz, much of what we call contemporary society is sterile. In almost every Window, the lone figure sits on a cold chess board like tile floor as if he were a single pawn left on the board after all other pieces had been retired from the game. The repetitiveness and monotony of the floor design seems to identify the structured indifference that Díaz sees in the routines of our daily existence, of the mechanical way in which we go about dealing with the present and structuring our priorities. In Díaz, as can be seen in other paintings, as well, contemporary U.S. society, wich its exaggerated materialism, has become bland, meaningless, and somewhat sterile. As a consequence, political freedom has succumbed to another type of incarceration of the spirit which masks, or limits, our ability to communicate freely with one another. Yet, there is hope that through contemplation we can transform this moral sterility into a more productive expression of our human needs by rediscovering the timeless significance or our cultural values.

      As already suggested the interior doorways and windows provide the lone dweller with an exit from the room´s sterility and suggest the pathways or escape routes leading to the rediscovery of his cultural memory and the historically artistic values that frame each Window. When viewed together, the columns and arches which open up to us the artist´s interior world also call to mind the creative genius of those civilization which have left us with a legacy of certain timeless spiritual and artistic values: Roman and Greek civilization, Islamic civilization, African civilization and Indigenous American civilizations. In particular, as seen in one of the windows, Díaz, the artist, in search of his own personal and cultural identity, rediscovers the spiritual dimensions of his Afro-Cuban and Christian religious syncretism. In affirming the validity of these inherited cultural values, which include the importance of self-sacrifice and reverence for the forces of nature, the artist affirms the validity of his art in the present.

      For Díaz, art is a medium through which the artist discovers or recaptures his spiritual freedom, his self-esteem. In his view, art itself is the Window through which the artist can communicate with history in hopes of solving the spiritual isolation produced by contemporary society. Art becomes the ultimate sanctuary wich provides the artist with the space necessary to express his nostalgia on behalf of culture and his passion for the spiritual dimension or our human existence.