Epic scenes of the sort featured in work of battles, coronations, and different main historic occasions will not be the specialty of Nick Quijano, an artist based mostly in Puerto Rico, with an internet exhibition hosted by Fort Gansevoort dedicated to works geared towards intimate scenes of on a regular basis life round his dwelling in Previous San Juan.
“I’m not into the massive tales of historical past portray,” Quijano stated in a Zoom interview from his studio final month. “I’m into the little tales—I need to enchantment to the intimacy of feeling and to the guts.”
Quijano started the sequence of work within the present in 1980 and has been “doing scenes of Puerto Rico ever since,” he stated. “I haven’t stopped as a result of I nonetheless relate to them.”
A few of Quijano’s items draw from his childhood recollections. In Cumpleaños con Brownie y Nilka (1956), accomplished in 2020, a younger boy carrying a blue blazer and a blue occasion hat stands in entrance of a birthday cake with a candle within the form of the quantity three. The boy, a younger Quijano, is flanked by two canines additionally with hats on their heads. Above them are streamers in crimson, yellow, blue, and inexperienced.
“I didn’t have any associates,” Quijano recalled of the scene within the portray, which is among the few works within the sequence based mostly on {a photograph}. “This aunt of mine who was organizing the celebration, she had two canines, so she put hats on them they usually had been my particular associates for the occasion. There’s numerous love in there.”
The work can also be animated by paint that goes past the confines of the canvas onto a wood matte that Quijano constructed—a recurring motif all through the sequence. “It goes past the body as a result of it appears to me {that a} portray is usually a portray of the previous—it appears to be caught in a second,” he stated. “The extensions that I give to my work attempt to deliver it to the second, to the current. It’s not one thing that occurred as a lot as one thing that’s taking place.”
Different works within the exhibition give attention to abnormal encounters the artist has witnessed in Previous San Juan. In Mercado (2020), two males learn newspapers as they await clients at their fruit stands in a market, their legs and wares extending onto the wood matte.
“I’m speaking about issues which might be nonetheless alive in me,” Quijano stated of a course of that pulls largely from reminiscence. He sees the works as drawing from “reminiscence with out the nostalgia. I don’t evoke it with a way of longing. It’s one thing that occurred and I need to rejoice it. I attempt to deliver the sensation of what that [scene] evoked in me.”
One other work accomplished final yr exhibits a person along with his raised and his eyes watering and barely crimson. “It’s any man and each man,” Quijano stated of Ave María (In memoriam of the victims of hurricane María). “The person maintain ups his arms in hopelessness. He’s crying throughout the chaos that Maria left. There’s nonetheless numerous damage and numerous restoration left.”
He continued, “Puerto Rico has been continually marginalized. We’re presupposed to be a part of the US, however we’re actually not. As a rustic, we’re not free but. We’re nonetheless a colony, the oldest colony on this planet.”
Bobbito Garcia, a DJ, filmmaker, and creator who organized Quijano’s Fort Gansevoort present, stated that political issues of the kind are key to understanding the exhibition. Garcia hopes the work “will present context to individuals who don’t perceive the connection of the U.S. to Puerto Rico. These are all deeper points that aren’t spelled out in Nick’s work, however I feel his work give some background and context to this.”
Garcia pointed to 1 work specifically that spoke to him, Las Noticias (2014), by which males sit in a plaza discussing the day’s information. On the middle are two males, one who’s fair-skinned and one other who’s Black. Garcia stated work of the sort “permit folks to see not a face of the Island however the faces of the Island and that features Black folks in Puerto Rico. I feel the media doesn’t all the time present the variety of our folks.”
Quijano echoed Garcia’s evaluation of his work, saying that he desires folks to have the ability to join along with his work by seeing scenes that may really feel acquainted.
“I’m attempting to painting them in order that one other viewers can relate by way of their experiences,” he stated. “It’s a approach of making communication the place the observer is extra than simply the mere passive viewers. What I felt, hopefully, will evoke one thing within the viewers’s coronary heart and recollections.”
Quijano continued, “We’re all going to die. However we need to dwell this expertise with essentially the most intense emotions we might have. The query is what are we going to do earlier than we move?” Work on the form of work he creates, Quijano stated, equates to “attempting to make sense of this factor referred to as life.”