About me: Between Lunacy and Sanity
Puerto Rican I am, legal only by chance. Walking down the streets of this gray city, I feel as if I have been here before. I am adapting to a city where insomnia and nightmares are intrinsic, where good manners are forgotten, where each minds his own business and rent prices kill us all. The light of the Caribbean comes back to me and helps me bring color to a city that has lost it. This is the result of a seclusion and journey of a few months. I work myths, experiences, sexuality and passion within a social context and with ecological concerns that have developed throughout the years. I enjoy toying with the idea that abstraction is easy to do, that a piece is validated by the amount of time you spend on it, that if I am Puerto Rican I have to return to the old tradition. Now I feel more Puerto Rican than ever, outside of my country, outside the "Isla del Encanto", far from my beaches, my rivers, my countryside where shorts and a t-shirt suffice. Nueva Yol, city where sunsets join pollution to create fabulous colors. Nueva Yol, city of opportunities? Of enchantments and disenchantments? Sexual city, cancerian city…
The works presented here are 15 pieces within abstraction where the formal elements of fine arts are present. Color plays in and of itself, joins its complementary color, its terciaries and, sometimes, its analogous. I attempt to break with the traditional color wheel, analyzing color and its components in a more complex manner, so that color speaks at its convenience. Color in combination with different mediums becomes opaqued, glossied, oxidized and satinized in the same piece. There are compositions of different complexities and references, and in this way they make space for each spectator's analysis and artistic education. It is not a matter of taste, but of identifying when we observe a piece that is attractive to us, of feeling a part of it, so that it evokes some feeling, emotion or rejection. With the stains that make up the pieces, I attempt to captivate and activate de spectator's psyche in a passive process evoking images that we carry in our subconscious depending on our life development. The interaction is up to the spectator… if he or she is interested in identifying, feeling an emotion or feeling satisfied, asking for an answer in exchange, meditating on the composition, its advantages and problems. As a spectator, I analyze myself and ask: Who am I? How am I? And where am I going? As an artist, I feel passionately about what I do and with that I will die.
Presently, figurative art is prevalent in the city given that artists are trying to make space for ourselves in this society since the market demands this type of work because of the need for a point of reference (focus) that identifies them. On the other hand, there are the investors and gallery owners that make a business out of such a beautiful career. We all know we have to live, eat and pay the bills, but where do we leave our commitment to fine arts? We throw it to the side to make money. This does not mean I reject figurative art, I am speaking about art in general, since many utilize it as a justification of their actions or as a lucrative means camouflaged behind culture. The market has academia pressured, commissions are commonplace and gallery owners want new blood. As an artist, I identify more with cultural work than with the money that I can derive from it. I am not here thanks to money but thanks to God.
For centuries, figurative art has been seen in a more positive light than abstraction and I know abstract expressionism was created in New York by people like Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning, among others. But at the same time in Puerto Rico there was Luis Hernández Cruz, Rafael Rivera Rosa, and Carmelo Sobrino, who worked with expressionism as one of their work's principal features. But I don't want to get into cultural polemics, just to mention that in each country there are icons of the fine arts that we might not be familiar with. I do want to note the difference between abstraction and abstract art. The first is concerned with analyzing the metamorphosis of the subject in question so that you make it yours until it reaches a sensation very particular to you. On the other hand, abstract art is produced analytically, using geometry as a departure point in many cases; these shapes can grow larger or smaller, can be fused, hidden or overlapping depending on the wishes of the artist. The line is key in this type of work, as much or more than geometry.
My ideals remain consistent and I am not seduced by economic necessity. Though this prostitution-like quality of art is present around the world, it is particularly notable in New York and it troubles me. The existence of spaces where artists pay an initiation fee, a monthly free and additional fees if he or she wants to organize a solo show is terrifying. They dress it up with the term coop gallery, so it sounds prettier, but the truth is that it remains an entity where money is a priority and artistic quality can get displaced by the people who can pay these high fees. In Puerto Rico there are no businesses of this sort; there are galleries that represent a group of artists and a great number of free spaces where you await a turn and you can use them, that is why I bring it up. Perhaps New York artists see this as normal, but for me and my colleagues who live in Puerto Rico this is an inconceivable idea. Well, each one makes money in the way he or she can or wants, but I cannot accept the idea that art and its creators get used in this manner.
I have been focused for a few years on natural and erotic themes, stressing the importance of both to create my pieces. The study and analysis of color has also been fundamental for me as an artist and as a human being. I consider it an enjoyable way to bring spectators to an analysis and a consciousness regarding its importance, and also to persuade the artistic taste of the individual. Subtly I take you on a voyage through the different worlds inhabited by a Puerto Rican outside his country, when he becomes an immigrant, legal only by chance.
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Te amo mi hermanito bello! Besitos y happy birthday atrasado... :) Espero que la hayas pasado super y que este sea un nuevo año de vida lleno de nuevas, buenas y enriquecidoras experiencias. MUAH!
