Memories of Puerto Rico
Fort Gansevoort’s first exhibition featuring selected paintings by Nick Quijano goes online. And it’s a colorful remedy for dark days.
Curator Bobbito Garcia, a critically acclaimed Puerto Rican author, filmmaker, and DJ, revealed in an interview that he’s become a fan in just a few short days since seeing the art of Nick Quijano. The energetic culture of the island country in the Caribbean Sea takes center stage in Quijano’s art, conveying the atmosphere of a place populated by the goodhearted people, who the artist portrays with a patriotic gaze. Granted, seeing paintings like El Encuentro and Baila la calle, you’d want to turn up the volume warming your house with the sounds of merengue and bolero. Quijano’s works are intimate and old-fashioned in a way that poeticize the conventional scenes of daily life not with a pretty filter of the phone photography, but with painting influenced by the aesthetics of Caribbean folk art.
The artist shared, that he hopes “that people can relate to these pieces, because they are autobiographical, if not physically or metaphorically, then symbolically,” In this sense, Memories of Puerto Rico is an homage to the distinctive heritage of Puerto Rico, and a means through which the artist introduces elements of this heritage into the conversation of contemporary art. Available online at Fort Gansevoort official website.