By the time Jabriel LaFrance was a schoolboy in 1990s Cuba, the contemporary art scene mixed vestiges of the Spanish Academy of Art’s formal influence with the ever present Soviet-inspired Cuban School of Social Realism. The latter still conveys the Communist Revolution’s struggle and success. Art, in the regime’s eyes, was and remains a means of education. The government still plasters public spaces with colorful posters portraying triumphant leaders fighting capitalism, mocking the US, and mugging at democracy. LaFrance and the roughly ten million other Cubans felt their country’s collapse in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed along with its sustaining support for the communist outpost 90 miles from Miami. Sinking into the Special Period of prolonged power outages, empty food stocks, and abject poverty, the island also experienced striking creativity as artists collaborated on street installations to address the intensity of the crisis. All an important vantage point for LaFrance, who says “In general, the themes that I worked on in the nineties appeared as a constant reference to the existential self-destruction of humanity, from the individual dimension to the broader concept of society.” Today, he is an emigré living and painting in a converted garage studio along a hot, dusty street in Panama City. Pinned all the way up his 20-foot walls are large, half-finished canvases colored with big, sweeping strokes that read energy to any viewer. The artist contends that the monumental scale is important to convey “the consequences of living in a communist dictatorship, the insular condition, the survival instinct of creativity, the exodus.” Still pressing, he says, are “the questions posed by the Cuban Art School’s inward look” at authoritative control over citizen rights. An examination that “transcends borders.” Mental Flank is the very example of this inward look with an outside ability to expose. As with the seminal work of other leading Cuban artists, symbolism, play and irony are of the essence. LaFrance, who spent his formative years in Cuba, then on an outer island, and finally out of the country, is now safe to express from afar, to convey his liberation from this time and place. Mental Flank may be in black and white but it requires a double take. The mother pushing the baby carriage shows the militarization of Cuban youth, explains the artist, who says the work recalls his own earliest memories. “When we were very young we were taught to march, to chant slogans, to sing military anthems, to repeat propaganda.” For eyes that need prodding, LaFrance’s perambulator is actually a tank, and the baby inside it, a raised gun.