Essence

ARTnews named Roche Rabell one of ten artists to watch at the start of the 1990s, describing his “lushly textured surfaces” as “defiantly passionate and personal,” reflective of “a scrupulous attempt to reconcile a divided sense of cultural and personal identity.”[1] Roche had left San Juan to study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1979, and he stayed through the following decade, working from a West Side studio. Influenced by the rambunctious representational work of the Chicago Imagists, in particular Ray Yoshida and Richard Keane, he emerged within the broader international context of Neo-Expressionism, whose fraught subjectivity and intense, painterly gesture burst upon the scene in the early 1980s. His early, iconic self-portraits bear the imprint of Puerto Rico’s postcolonial history as well as his own religious feeling and self-referential mythologies, projecting an at times antagonized political and existential identity. This psychic tension is literalized in the physical process and technique of his painting, which incorporated elements of frottage, in which rubbings are taken from objects and human bodies, and multiple monotypes, often printed with leaves and lace. “My painting becomes a living ritual,” Roche once reflected. “It is worth mentioning that I have an obsession for life and for denying death, that my actions have a degree of rawness to activate the inanimate and to contain that which has life. . . . I couldn’t be more aware of the concept of change from life to death, that when I play with figuration, the ‘rubbing,’ it becomes an experiment to get the material to show itself.”[2]
In his intricately montaged and metaphorical self-portraits of the late 1980s, Roche projected the complexity of Puerto Rican identity, painting and imprinting himself in a material process of becoming. As in We Have to Dream in Blue (1986) and The Spirit of the Titan (1989), Essence renders the artist’s face at a heroic scale, his features inscribed within a richly textured, all-over pattern of shimmering foliage. An arrangement of iridescent fronds equally composes and camouflages his face, the ferns an allusion to the tropical flora native to the Caribbean. The painting’s sensuous surface, made by meticulous impressions of painted leaves—sometimes the same specimens used several times—suggestively conflates the human and the botanical, its hybridity mirrored in the monotype medium itself, a fusion of painting and printmaking. Dark, watchful eyes peer out from behind dense layers of vegetation; pensive and brooding, they seem to question the essence of what makes one human and, moreover, Puerto Rican, their Neo-Expressionist and postcolonial subjectivity embedded in the physical properties of the medium. “At one time what motivated me to elaborate the self-portraits was a search for the forms and ways to enlarge my perception of myself and of life,” Roche recalled. “These are images that reconcile themselves with the world; consciously and subconsciously they are like the manifestation of a sixth sense, a final reality.”[3]
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park