[2] They remained in Turkey until the Greco-Turkish Wars of the early 20th century, after which they emigrated first to Marseilles, France in 1918 and then to Cuba in 1920, within the area of Old Havana, which had a substantial Jewish community.
[3] His mother encouraged his progression as a self-taught artist and he continued developing in this way (“unrestrained”) until he received a scholarship to study painting in Kent State University.
Upon attending, he felt socio-economically excluded from the fine art world due to his background, though he remained strongly dedicated to design.
Therefore, he followed in his father's footsteps and switched his major to architecture, continuing to paint as a personal hobby and minor income source.
[4] In his personal painting, however, his style had begun to evolve away from realism and representational imagery as his architecture studies impacted him creatively.
Throughout the 1960s Salinas was increasingly active in exhibiting his painting in art venues throughout the United States (Florida, Texas, Missouri) as well as internationally in Mexico and Guatemala.
[6][9] GALA members (Salinas, Enrique Riveron, Rafael Soriano, José María Mijares, Roxanna McAllister, and Osvaldo Gutiérrez) would gather bi-monthly to discuss their individual art projects, sponsorships, and organize bi-annual group exhibitions.
[5] During this period Salinas was neighbors with fellow prominent Cuban artist Juan Gonzalez and taught him the airbrush painting technique González used to achieve the large-scale hyperrealism style that would soon gain him recognition by leading art institutions in following decade.
Salinas also became associated with prominent Spanish painters, including Joan Miró, Antoní Tàpies, as well as American Alexander Calder.
He also became immersed in Spain's literary community and developed close friendships with several writers including María Zambrano, José Angel Valente, Vahe Godel, Ramon Dachs, Pere Gimferrer, and Michel Butor.
[17] It also saw his color palette shift toward more subtle and neutral tones with a strong emphasis on whites and grays, often inspired by and symbolizing clouds.
[18] Salinas would call this concept “The Language of the Clouds,” which became a series of works exploring this color palette and approach to abstraction.
[18][19] During his Spain period, Salinas would also explore the pictographs of China and Japan as well as foreign alphabets including Greek, Iberian, and Hebrew.
These alphabets reflected the influence of the writers he was exposed to and his interest in reducing patterns to fundamentals and abstracting them with his palette of white, which he associated with purity and cleanliness, particularly in the context of its prevalence in Barcelona.
[4] The pair had a long-running collaboration that would grow to include a second book, Arbol (Tree), in 1985 as well as a number of other projects through editor and gallerist Orlando Blanco.
[15] Since returning to the United States, he has exhibited in New York City, Chicago, Spain, France, Switzerland, Japan, Egypt, Panama, Venezuela, and elsewhere.
[3] Upon his return to the United States in 1992, Salinas also met his second wife Marilyn C. Fonts, who was then employed in a South Florida fine art gallery; the couple would wed in 2004.
[27] Salinas’ artwork and architecture design have their foundation in mid-century movements which he has interpreted and updated with a number of personal influences and themes.
As an architect, Salinas is part of the Modernist tradition and before his retirement had prominently utilized concrete-heavy designs that drew influence from Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, Le Corbusier, and Erich Mendelsohn.
He is identified with the Abstract Expressionism movement,[19][29] having first been exposed to the work of its leading members (Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Zao Wou-Ki) while at Kent State University.
Salinas described abstract painters Albert Rafols Casamada and Tàpies as influences on his work in Barcelona and also considered Miró a mentor while maintaining that they each had differing styles and approaches.
[6][30][9] His “Penca de Palma Triste” (Leaf of a Sad Palm) series of the late 1980s expressed his Cuban identity in exile as Salinas depicts a single leaf of a palm tree, a longtime quintessential symbol of Cuba, as symbolic of a piece removed from the whole, while also using his abstract method to create ambiguous images that can also be interpreted as waterfalls or the tail feathers of an exotic bird.
[4][2] Key Jewish-inspired series' of Salinas work include his award-winning collaboration with José Angel Valente, Tres Lecciones de Tinieblas, as well as his paintings for the Torah Project in 2015.
"[20] In describing Salinas' style, art critic Carlos M. Luis stated: "Baruj uses color and all its intense chromatism as a channel or filter (in the manner of alchemists) to distill a world of a romantic nature, but of a Romanticism closer to Turner than to Corot.
[29][32] These include multiple exhibitions in Cuba, the United States, Spain, France, Italy, Switzerland, Egypt, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Argentina, and elsewhere.
[51] In 2019 he participated in the second “Art + Architecture” exhibition in Coral Gables, Florida, where he was the main featured artist alongside his late fellow Grupo GALA member José Mijares.
[26] Originally intended to be held at the Miami Freedom Tower, Salinas stated that the retrospective was "the best and most comprehensive exhibition of my career” noting that, in comparing the venues, the Museum allowed for considerably more work to be featured.