October 24 - December 20, 2009This year, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Puerto Rico commemorates its 25th anniversary and begins this important period of celebration with an exhibition of recent work by Arnaldo Roche Rabell, titled Azul (Blue).
Roche is one of the most significant and well-known Puerto Rican artists on the island and internationally. His pictorial work has been characterized by its emphasis on problematizing the limits of figuration and the representation of the human body, expanding the use of color and elaborating a narrative art that oscillates between emblematic and direct political questioning, and the construction of a subjectivity that is concerned with personal mythology. Frequently, the public and private have mixed in this work, known for its color, its formal daring and for its adherence to the human figure and an inventory of everyday objects. Azul presents a substantial change from the artist's traditional practices. Recurring, almost exclusively to blue monochrome and pure white line, to the carving of pigment on paper or linen, and to the creation of work on a much larger scale, Roche represents his notion of the figure and narrative and represents his of working the pictorial plane. In the new images, the characterstic iconography of the artist persists, but it is reconfigured austerely in order to emphasize the meanings behind the imagery.
This new pictorial sobriety, which distances itself from the explosion of color and texture of his previous work, may be unexpected to the wider audiences that are familiar with the artist's work. Despite this, this new style was already latent his work of the 1970s and 1980s. To illustrate this development, along with new works, the exhibition presents works from earlier periods in which this new direction is readily apparent.
Azul has been curated by Dr. Lilliana Ramos Collado, Dr. Ivette Fred Rivera and Marianne Ramírez Aponte, Executive Director of MAC.
