Blue Curse (2019) marks an important transitional moment in the aesthetics of Brey’s work coming out of his series Adrift. Responding to the shock of witnessing the impact of climate change upon returning to his home country of Cuba and a feeling of “drifting” resulting from a period of health-related impaired mobility, Brey says that “Adrift picks up fragments that float in my memory, images that have no place in the rigid parameters of my previous work and in everything that happens near my center of interest and appropriates and digests it all like a giant jellyfish with enormous tentacles…To a large extent, Adrift, rather than a strict concept to define a specific project or work, is a state of consciousness (awareness).”

With an oil-stained background, collaged accents, and penciled background details, Blue Curse shares many qualities characteristic of Brey’s other works in Adrift. What sets Blue Curse apart is the vivid plume of Prussian blue, which transforms into flourishes of floral and rhizomatic shapes as the cloud billows out, appearing to grow out like weeds floating in empty space, a precursor to the chromatic shift towards the blue-dominated color palette that defines in his works today.