Zilia Sánchez. Amazonas, 1993; acrylic on stretched canvas, 52.5 × 42 × 11 in. Courtesy of Newcomb Museum.

It is increasingly clear that the current U.S. Congress will not inject public dollars into the largest overseas territory still under the sovereign control of the U.S. Instead, massive cuts to education, healthcare, and retirement pensions will eke out less than a quarter of what is owed over the next ten years. Puerto Rico’s debt to Wall Street will be paid by teachers, students, and retirees of the island. Zilia Sánchez fits into many of these categories. One of the island’s most venerable artists, at age ninety-one Sánchez has taught at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas for decades. Sánchez’s work is a reminder of the tension inherent in canvas. Her technique of stretching canvas over molded wooden armatures creates a thin, porous, skin-like feeling. In Amazonas (1993), a quartet of powder-blue waveforms cover the canvas. The apex of each wave has a white nipple, as if two women’s bodies were floating just beneath the water, with only their breasts visible to the onlooker. Sánchez’s work combines the fluidity of the natural landscape with female objectification in a seamless manner, suggesting a connection between the colonization of the island and the body.

Elsa María Meléndez. El Ingenio Colectivo o la Maldición de la Cotorra, 2014;
installation view, Beyond the Canvas, 2017. Courtesy of Newcomb Museum.

Elsa María Meléndez similarly breaks out of the traditional canvas frame to depict Puerto Rican bodies, but does so with a much more riotous and dissenting aesthetic. In the installation El Ingenio Colectivo o la Maldición de la Cotorra (2014), Meléndez uses canvas as a material for installation, breaking completely from a two-dimensional picture plane. The installation is made up of white jackets, rough pants, and arched feet, all pressed against the wall. Dogs that look like they might have died and come back to life guard the bodies. A cloud of heads hangs above, detached but not by much. An island of debris floats in front of all this, filled with canvas hands, pins, and needles. Everything about this installation is tense. The use of canvas—a rough, beautiful material—grounds this piece. If the installation had been made in paper, or another fine material, the meaning would be obscured and disembodied. It’s easy to see this piece as an homage to the student protesters who have been marching against the installation of PROMESA, the control council that effectively takes fiscal decision making away from the Puerto Rican government.[2]  #NoAlaJunta, or #NoToTheCouncil, one of the protesters’ hashtags, is delicately stitched into pieces of canvas and strewn throughout the trashed island. This piece makes clear that this is no celebration of the 100th anniversary of Puerto Rican U.S. citizenship, but a cry for independence.

Pedro Vélez. Surrender Flag with Dollar Skull, or Surrender Flag with Zombie Abstraction, 2015; mahogany and acrylic on reversible canvas, 31 x 67 x 5 in. Courtesy of Newcomb Museum​.

The work of Pedro Vélez, an artist and critic, is in conversation with many aspects of the world: personal, political, and artistic. His canvas flags drip with symbols of colonialism. Surrender Flag with Dollar Skull, or Surrender Flag with Zombie Abstraction (2015) has a refined, highly designed wooden handle from which a flag of a large red dollar sign is painted with seemingly slapdash, gestural brushstrokes. White flags such as this are generally symbolic of submission or truce, and this one could be read as a surrender to the capitalism of the United States, which for decades allowed Puerto Rico to be a tax haven for corporations, leading to a proliferation of headquarters and offices based on the island. But in 1996, Congress cut out the tax breaks that had made Puerto Rico so attractive to companies. The island immediately plunged into a recession from which it has never recovered. Vélez’s work operates on multiple levels—always with a sense of irreverence and rage—and has a long history of critiquing the power sources of the art market along with global politics. This flag could also be a surrender to the corruption of high art. From a personal perspective, it suggests the struggle of being a working artist in Puerto Rico in the midst of a massive debt crisis.

Beyond the Canvas curators Mónica Ramírez-Montagut and Warren James manage to balance two investigations in this exhibit. As the title suggests, the question of how each artist has formally evolved their canvas away from a two-dimensional field is a prominent thread throughout. But the exhibition is also an investigation of what it means to be a Puerto Rican artist working at a moment when economic catastrophe afflicts the 3.4 million U.S. citizens who live there. Perhaps, like the two-dimensional canvas, the political reality of being a protectorate of the United States is pushing out and ripping apart so that a new dimension of government can be built—for and by the people of Puerto Rico.

Beyond the Canvas: Contemporary Art from Puerto Rico will be on view through July 9, 2017.

[1] Detroit’s bankruptcy, by comparison, was $18 billion, almost only a tenth of the Puerto Rican bankruptcy.

[2] PROMESA has called for severe austerity measures, such as a $512 million reduction to the public university by 2025. “La Presidenta de la UPR Aclara el Propuesto Recorte de $512 Millones,” El Nuevo Dia, April 19, 2017, http://www.elnuevodia.com/noticias/locales/nota/planfiscaldelauprcontemplarecortesdehasta512millones-2312768/

Lionel Cruet. Intangible Sites, 2016; audiovisual installation in shipping container; 96 x 120 x 98 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Some of his works become portals to other sites, exploring the possibility for one to have a geographic experience in absentia. Yet the geographic cannot be separated from the sociopolitical. In his piece Intangible Sites (2016), Cruet projects a series of still images and video clips given to him by the immigrant community of Taos, New Mexico, onto the back wall of a shipping container, suffusing the small space with reflected light. The voices of Cruet’s interviewees, some in English and others in Spanish, are heard, speaking to the landscapes projected on the wall. For example, two English speakers relate the images to particular memories of their earlier lives in the Dominican Republic and Mexico—remembering other places through their current landscape.

Lionel Cruet. Espacio Intangible (Intangible Space), exterior view sequence, 2014; audiovisual installation in shipping container; 84 x 120 x 96 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Much like Lauret Savoy’s autobiographical journey through the United States in her book Trace (2015), Cruet investigates the junctures between physical landscape, racial histories, and personal narratives. Yet while Savoy sought to uncover from the American landscape the buried stories of both the slaves and indigenous people from whom she was born, Cruet, in Intangible Sites, suggests that physical places hold alternative narratives, through immigrant experiences; the sites in question are perhaps not of the Southwest at all, but of places further afield.

Lionel Cruet. The Shade of a Paradise, 2015; digital print on photo paper; 20 x 30 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Through his works, Cruet asks about representations as failed reconstructions of place; he is curious about where the edges of images, ephemera, and memory overlap yet never seem to touch. In The Shade of a Paradise I (2015), Cruet layers digital images within their computer-program windows, creating a haphazard effect like a Google search for “the tropics.” The background image shows the dark undersides of palm trees, and over this are a swatch of a blue gradient, an image of a blue tarp, a low-resolution image of people climbing onto a boat, and a screen shot of descriptive and marketing copy for a tarp. The result is a collage that simultaneously conjures the shining fantasy of tropical islands and the reality of their relative poverty while never showing an image of the actual places. Cruet reveals a lexicon of associations that are used to refer to island nations but that—even when they are attuned to discourses of poverty and vulnerability—can never fully describe them.

Lionel Cruet. Islands, 2015; digital print on polyethylene vinyl stretched on canvas frame; 48 x 70 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

This associative weave results in pieces that gesture toward systems greater than their whole but do not attempt to make up for what they lack. Rather, the power of Cruet’s ouevre is in its ability to confer an almost indecipherable complexity through inference. In his work Islands (2015), Cruet looks at what is called “illegal offshore migration” and the intersecting ideation and realities of place. Islands is an unattributed color image of men captured during their attempt to enter the United States from the Caribbean, printed on a large piece of vinyl that conjures associations of tarps, camping, and rubber rafts. A black-and-white image of the tops of palm trees is partially superimposed at the bottom of the composition, and the colors of the clothes worn by the arrested men—bright pink, blue denim, nautical stripes—bleed through the palm fronds. The leaves conjure a memory of tropical places as well as a feeling of hiding within jungle undergrowth, creating a sense of simultaneous longing and danger. A border-patrol boat looms in the waters behind the men, and the muzzle of a machine gun pokes into the scene from the right side. Cruet creates a visual synecdoche, interweaving a series of narratives into one image, on the shore of this unnamed, but perhaps not unknown, nation, revealing the ways in which the ideal, the personal, and the geopolitical are intertwined in the construction of place. Ultimately, Cruet does not ask that the manifold layers of significance be pulled apart in order to be comprehended, but rather that they be felt together, as a whole composed of powerfully incomplete iterations.

Lionel Cruet. Horizons, 2015; inkjet print; 13 x 19 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Lionel Cruet was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and received a BFA from La Escuela de Artes Plásticas in Puerto Rico and an MFA from the City College of New York. He was the recipient of the Juan Downey Audiovisual Award in 2013 at the 11th Media Arts Biennale at the National Museum of Fine Arts, Santiago, Chile. In 2015, his solo show, Lionel Cruet: In Between, Real and Digital, was presented at Bronx River Art Center in New York. His artwork has been in group exhibitions such as SuperReal: Alternative Realities in Photography and Video at El Museo del Barrio in New York, Colonial Comfort at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico and the Sound Art Fair at Sala de las Artes, Universidad de Sagrado Corazón in Puerto Rico, among others. In 2016 he participated in the AIM Program with the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and his projects have been published by Made in Mind magazine, Designboom, and Catálogodiseño magazine. His work focuses on subjects of geopolitics, economy, and technology, and uses experimental digital-printing processes, audiovisual materials, performance, and installations.

Paraiso at ltd los angeles. Installation view. Image courtesy of ltd los angeles.

Take Paraíso’s three opening works: Michael Linares’s Untitled, 2011, a big, blue balloon hovering above several beached strands of triangular, car-lot flags, weighted down by a rock; Linares’s Wait ‘til it grows, 2011, two small coconut trees sprouting straight from the coconuts themselves, burdened by a hammock strung between them that has yet to make it off the ground; and Charles Juhaz-Alvarado’s Del brazo a la garganta: (mimus polyglottos), 2011, a large, handcrafted wooden bulldozer claw that looks like it should be attached to an equally huge wooden bulldozer, but which is actually attached to a vehicle the size of a toy.  All three works exist in indeterminate states, with the onus on the viewer to decide whether the balloon is ascending or descending, or whether the hammock will make it off the ground.

Paraiso at ltd los angeles. Installation view. Image courtesy of ltd los angeles.

Michael Linares, Wait 'til it grows, 2011-ongoing. 4 feet x 8 feet. Image courtesy ltd los angeles.

This “half-empty or half-full” scenario continues throughout the show, including Jesús “Bubu” Negrón’s video La Promesa, 2003, in which the artist lovingly and exasperatedly drags an empty wheelchair from the airport in Mexico City to Ex-Teresa, an exhibition venue, stopping at multiple bars.  Two equally entertaining works by Negrón sit at the registrar’s desk: Mini Colillón Masculino, 2011, and Mini Colillón Femenino, 2011, a set of two giant and crumpled cigarette butts made of hundreds of smaller cigarettes.  Here your options include being disgusted by the sculptures’ material or wowed by their whimsy (including lipstick stains to indicate which Colillón is Femenino).

Jesús “Bubu” Negrón, La Promesa, 2003. Digital video with photonovela. Image courtesy ltd los angeles.

Jesús “Bubu” Negrón, Mini Colillón Masculino, 2011, and Mini Colillón Femenino, 2011. Cigarette butts, lipstick and glue. 8 in x 4 in x 4 in, approximately. Image courtesy ltd los angeles.

While Paraíso’s visual punning is reminiscent of the Puerto Rican artists Allora and Calzadilla’s entry at this year’s Venice Biennale, its message is more nuanced.  The press release for the show makes much of the idea that paradise relates to action, referencing scholar Alan Millard’s description of paradise as a work of cultural memory, as well as Cuban author José Lezama Lima’s book Paradiso, a sprawling tale in which little happens but just about everything is discussed.  Whimsy, beauty and tragedy are all there for the taking, but Paraíso reminds us that more often than not, they come as one package, and it’s up to us to decide how we’d like to unwrap it.

Paraíso is on view through August 13, 2011, at ltd los angeles in Los Angeles.

courtesy of the artist

Chicago artist Josue Pellot deploys several mediums and styles in order to examine his Puerto Rican roots as transplanted into the quintessential American experience – that is, as mediated by pop culture and consumerism in his current exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center.  Thus, he displays a photomontage of the iconic fortress El Morro in Puerto Rico in which it is conflated with a supermercado/laundromat/liquor store.  In fact, many architectural structures in the United States do mimic this famous castle, and his neon sculpture of conquistadors and the native population’s revenge, 1493, was originally installed in the windows of La Municipal, a supermarket in Humboldt Park, during the last Puerto Rican Day Parade.

In Temporary Allegiance, the artist has placed in the gallery a flag that is an amalgam of U.S. and Puerto Rican flags, more specifically the remains of what was originally used by the artist in a installation/performance in Puerto Rico, after damage sustained by local police interference.  Sitting limply in the gallery as sculpture, one can only guess at the resonance and tensions encapsulated in its history.

courtesy of the artist

Josue Pellot received a BFA from the University of Illinois in Chicago in 2003 and an MA in Art Theory and Practice from Northwestern University in 2006.  His work has been presented in several exhibitions in the Chicago area and in San Juan, Puerto Rico including a performance at the Museo de Arte de San Juan.