Arnaldo Roche-Rabell

The Puerto Rican Masters

The first filiation deliberately acknowledged by Roche corresponds to the masters who have developed their oeuvre throughout the 19th and during the early 20th century – José Campeche, Francisco Oller, Ramón Frade – as proved by his painting Campeche, Oller y Roche (2000). El reino de Pantaleón and La dama se baja del caballo, although making clear reference to Campeche, are endowed with a strong dose of humor, black humor in the case of the former, more of a complicit humor shared with the viewer in the case of the latter, as if inviting him or her to forget about both the conventions governing the behavior of a well-bred lady and the rules governing painting, in order to envisage these ruptures through a new gaze.

On several occasions, Roche quotes Francisco Oller y Cestero, symbolizing the building of an awareness with respect to Puerto Rican culture.

Intimacy with Van Gogh

Roche establishes a communion with Van Gogh, to whom he is linked by a visual experience, by some painful personal experiences, and by a technique based on a thick impasto and a gamut of vibrant colors. Each of them has expressed his difficulty to harmonize a rendition that, due to its clash with the risky nature of life, goes beyond the representation of life or of the object.

On re-composing into a continuum three drawings of the Saint-Paul- de-Mausole asylum executed by Van Gogh, Roche renders moments and places as well as states of the soul. It is a spatial continuum, the one of the asylum, and it is therefore mental, but it is also temporal, since it introduces a spatial lag, that of the door halfway between an external reality and a self-absorbed world. Roche proposes an itinerary that is almost an initiation, handing certain keys to the spectator, but leaving him unprepared to face the final enigma. The monumental scale leads the viewer into this universe which, through the spontaneous vitality of the brushstroke, makes it possible to understand the urgency shared by both artists. The asylum – like the self-portrait – becomes an anchor on which Rabell deposits feelings, convictions, fears, and which creates a link between the unconscious and the real world. Some pairs of objects start to make up the subject and its double: an easel, some flowers, a chair, a bed, which multiply and superimpose connotations, contexts, and time periods.

Lam ́s Imprint Another filiation, a subterranean one, or rather, a sub-archipelago and constant one, allows Roche to identify his work not only with the Puerto Rican essence but also with the Caribbean one. The world of Wifredo Lam, especially the one developed after The Jungle (1943-44), underlies Arnaldo ́s universe. Roche Rabell ́s oeuvre shares with Lam ́s its formal aspect, adopting a baroque quality in accordance with the model, while at the same time the relationship with nature rejects tropical exoticism, inquiring into the spiritual narrative. It is also based on the legacy of Lam, who considered that painting was “an act of de-colonization.” This concept has had significant repercussions on the work of artists. The incorporation of the subordinate Afro-Caribbean culture has been a trigger, mainly for artists from the 1980s and 1990s.

Roche ́s Splendid Dramatization

Reflection and the confrontation of cultural symbols have been accompanied by a relevant practice in his production. He has chosen a strong relationship with his model(s), very different from the one conveyed by The Painter and His Model, so recurring in “Western” art, and in particular, in Picasso.

Roche modifies the way of grasping the significance of the model. He does not do so through the gaze of a demiurge; the medium resides, rather, in the tactile and in ductility. On the other hand, “the model” does not act like a muse, or like a nude; he/she does not convey beauty, or aestheticism, or gracefulness.

The chosen model may be a man or a woman ́s body, a face, but it may also be any object whatsoever: a chair, a bed, or even a car. Besides, most often this representation of the object appears as the receptacle of the human trace, of a blurred silhouette, scarcely outlined, with a spectral look.

This procedure is totally in tune with the world of confinement that the Puerto Rican artist proposes to the viewer. It consists of two phases: a molding process to cover the subject, and a phase of working on the canvas spread out on the ground. Almost transformed into a “sculptor” without vindicating this role, Roche gradually molds the model, confronting his/her physicality, bringing to the surface or removing the volumes in an act of strength, highlighting an attitude, scratching a detail, a line. In this first stage he is more interested in what the first impasto stroke suggests than in aesthetics or the purity of the line. Later he will resort to “grattage” (scratching), which requires so much energy, to produce translucent signs, traces. When a face can be glimpsed, the spectator immediately associates it to a shroud connoting suffering and death, and even more, to a religious icon, due to the title – Blessing America– and the symbolic aura. The reiteration of the portrait, a constant in his whole oeuvre, is transformed in this last series into an accumulation that is not altogether repetitive, since each of them unveils a different facet of the pain it expresses.

Quick scratches, maculated traces bring out that which is hidden and internal, and gradually unveil it, with the complicity of work resorting to different textures based on vegetal elements.

Roche has progressively displayed an organic poetics throughout his oeuvre. He invites the viewer to penetrate the greatness of a tree through the trace of a small twig or the majesty of nature through the vegetal fan he features in one of his works. His approach to typically Caribbean vegetation is similar to Lam ́s. He does not offer an exotic vision; rather, he proposes a more profound dimension, suggesting that underneath the surface lies a spiritual and sensual world. The act of smearing some branches with pure colors later to remove them from the canvas in order to leave some light, many- nuanced traces constitutes a challenge halfway between an act of violence and one of delicacy. It can also interweave them with great subtlety. In both cases, a beat emerges, rhythms appear.

Emotion and sensuality lead Roche to entwine fragility with strength, suffering with a new aesthetics of nature. The artist appropriates sumptuous colors such as yellow and blue, before distributing some darker tones that endow prosaic objects – a car – with substance. On the one hand, they may contribute to make everything dense: the light, the shadows, space, the atmosphere. On the other hand, they stress the deformity of the bodies that the brushstroke has highlighted at the same time it emphasized nature ́s aesthetic quality. Numerous elements enter into a state of symbiosis: correspondences between the plasticity and the flexibility of the supports; assemblages of supports, of techniques, of subject matter; paradoxes that dissolve. What he shows is not really what constitutes the core of his painting; its essence resides, rather, in the fragile, and in the capacity of this fragility to renew itself, or, to employ an oxymoron, as the artist does, in the strength of this fragility.

Profile:

Arnaldo Roche-Rabell was born in Santurce, Puerto Rico in 1955. After pursuing studies of Architecture, Design and Illustration, he obtained his MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1984. He has been the recipient of prestigious distinctions, among them, the Visual Arts Award (New York, 1991) and the Medallion of Lincoln Award for the Visual Arts (Illinois, 1981). He has presented numerous solo shows, among which special mention may be made of Hispanic Art in the United States, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1984; Art of the Fantastic, Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1987; Latin American Artists of the 20th Century, MoMA, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museum I.udwig, Cologne, 1992-93; Arnaldo Roche- Rabell: The Flrst Ten Years, Museum of Contemporary Art - MARCO, Monterrey, Mexico, 1993; Selections from the Collection, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., 1994; Arnaldo Roche-Rabell, Museum of Modern Art, Mexico City, 1995; Art in Chicago, 1945 - 1995; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1996; Arnaldo Roche-Rabell, The Uncommonwealth, Anderson Gallery, Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia; Museum of American Art, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1996; El Humor y la Rabia, Fundación Caixa Catalunya, Barcelona, 2001; Arnaldo Roche-Rabell: Fraternos, Ponce Art Museum, Puerto Rico, 2003; Arnaldo Roche, Painting: Surviving Insanity, Latin American Masters, Beverly Hills, 2004. His works are included in the permanent collections of several museums in the U.S.A. He is currently represented exclusively by Walter Otero Gallery.

The endogenous and the external model, the renovated conception of the notion of “model” arising from tactility, corporeity, the emotional, the integration of nature in a relation of osmosis with the human being, result in a Caribbeanness that entwines with universalism.