A thrilling two-minute video on the gallery’s “Panorama Latinoamericano” exhibition by an independent Miami TV producer, Luis Fernando Sosa, has been posted on univision.com.
The dramatic scenario features dizzying zooms and a familiar musical theme, with Sosa playing a wild-eyed art enthusiast who tries to make off with several works of art. He is thwarted by a gallery staffer.
To our knowledge, the heart-stopping action piece has not yet been nominated for any major awards.
Arnaldo Roche-Rabell, internationally known as one of the leading artists from Puerto Rico, actually launched his career in Chicago. While living there as an art student, he began showing his work in university galleries and alternative spaces. At one of those shows in the Art Institute of Chicago he took a first prize of $5,000, which he used for his master’s degree tuition at the institute.
That was in 1984. Today Roche-Rabell is represented in dozens of stellar collections, including those of the New York’s Metropolitan Museum and Museo del Barrio, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, the Art Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, and other leading museums in Mexico, Venezuela and Puerto Rico, along with important private collections such as Chase Manhattan Bank and Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company in Chicago.
His work has been exhibited in major museums and leading galleries throughout the world. A recent solo exhibition, “Fraternal: The Bridge Between My Brother and Me,” was shown at Virginia Commonwealth University, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Nevada Musem of Art, and the Kranner Art Museum at the University of Illinois.
Marimar Benitez, writing in “Boricua Culture,” notes that “Roche Rabell”s very process of painting explores the relationship between image and reality, between the object and its representation, and simultaneously involves a ritual with sexual and metaphysical connotations. Many of his works are based on visions and dreams, which he transforms into forceful visual images.”
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Picture it in your mind: thousands of multihued dabs of paint filling two-thirds of a four-foot canvas, fading into pale oblivion at its top. In the right corner, a bevelled window opening into bright light that flows through the window onto an artist’s palette furnished with an array of colors. Framed in the window opening is a single bell, linked to the palette by a taut cord. Could it be the palette of a deity, who mixes the colors of the world’s multiethnic masses represented by the colorful strokes of paint below? Is the bell a reminder of the belief that every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings?
Another canvas features hundreds of buildings, each atop its own towering cube, in a barren tan plain. The buildings seem to radiate out a single cleared area in a symmetrical forest. In the key-shaped clearing stands a teepee. The composition reminds us that before we bulldozed most of our nation, the Indians lived in harmony with nature.
Paintings by Heriberto Mora, whose enigmatic oils are featured in our current exhibition, “Visiones Personales,” often suggest a spiritual or environmental message. Mora had three paintings featured in a 2004 Hollywood film, “Curdled.” He also has had his work featured as covers on four books.
After graduating from the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts in Havana, Mora followed the path of many other emigrating Cubans, first moving to Spain and then to Florida. Since then he has exhibited in a number of galleries in Florida, New York, North Carolina, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.
Mora’s provocative works are included in such collections as the Lowe Art Museum and Frost Art Museum, both in Miami, and the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art, along with the Absolut Vodka Collection in New York as well as private collections in Madrid, Paris, New York, Bogota, Miami, Washington, Caracas, Buenos Aires, Monterrey, Mexico City and San Juan.
See more about this artist here