Arnaldo Roche Rabell
Self-expression, if not outright autobiography, is a common thread found in contemporary art. Many critics even maintain that all art reflects the artist’s personality and situation. This theory is applicable to Arnaldo Roche-Rabell, also known as Arnaldo Roche. Born in Santurce, Puerto Rico, in 1955, he began his study of art, particularly drawing and painting, at the Escuela Superior Luchetti. His mentor was Lope Max Diaz. He attended the Architecture School of the University of Puerto Rico from 1974 to 1978. Then, convinced by a teacher’s comment that he was more interested in painting and influenced by a dream he had, Roche moved to Chicago in 1979 to study at the Art Institute of Chicago. There he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, followed by a Master of Fine Arts in 1984. He credits his teachers in Chicago, specifically artists Ray Yoshida and Richard Keane and art historian Robert Loesher, as critical to his artistic development. His major artistic touchstones include painters Vincent van Gogh, Ivan Albright, and Leon Golub, and ceramic sculptor Robert Arneson. He is partial to the indigenous and devotional art of Puerto Rico as well as the Northern Renaissance and Italian Baroque art in the collection of the Museo de Arte de Ponce. The artist has also studied African and visionary art.
Of mixed heritage, Roche has produced self-portraits since 1981, including a series of his face done in varying skin tones, between light and very dark. Other series include Fraternos, which addressed the artist’s relationship with his brother as parallel to that of Vincent van Gogh and his brother Theo, and El Legado, which presents the neutral and negative aspects of the commonwealth status of Puerto Rico in relation to the United States. The artist says, “Without romanticizing my situation, there are too many things I would like to experiment with through painting, even though I have no doubt I am marked for pain. That is how I see myself when confronted by tragedy, as something spontaneous, as a need that can be shared through images.” [1]
Roche makes his art in an unusual process he calls “cloaking” or “cocoons.” The artist envelops his subjects entirely in paper or canvas traces, rubs as in frottage, or prints upon it, creating imagery from a hidden or absent source. In an interview he explained his complicated method: “Generally, I begin a picture by placing three or four layers of paint on a previously prepared canvas. These layers are applied evenly one on top of the other, allowing several days to pass between each application. I evenly apply yellow, orange, red and then darker color oils such as blue, violet or green, and let them dry until they are ready to receive figurative elements that are rubbed into the painting from under the canvas, or the impression of leaves, laces or projections that show up in the foreground. … Whenever I have to take a rubbing of a body or object, I must loosen the canvas completely from its frame and stretch it while covered by multiple layers of oil paint, an average minimum of five times for each picture before it is finished.” [2]
Roche’s self-identity as both Puerto Rican and American, as a former Catholic but now Protestant, of European, African, and native ancestry, and as a victim/perpetrator of tragedy is directly related to his aesthetic investigations. As art historian Robert Hobbs claims, “His iconography is rich and complex, involving a commingling of investigations of the self and its many masks, as well as familial relations, biblical and mythological subject, and the intricate and at times incestuous political relationships between the United States and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.” [3]
Notes:
[1] Mercedes Lizcano, Interview with Arnaldo Roche-Rabell. http://www.latinart.com/transcript.cfm?id=67. January 12, 2005.
[2] Lizcano, Interview.
[3] Robert Carleton Hobbs, Arnaldo Roche-Rabell: The Uncommonwealth (Seattle WA: University of Washington Press, 1996), 9.
