Ramon Lopez-Colon

Lives and works in Hormigueros, Puerto Rico

Artist statement

My work explores the visual possibilities of representation of Puerto Rico’s political status through the interaction of the iconography that construct the island history and modernist painting approaches. As a consequence of being raised in the town of Guánica, PR (est. 1508), the events that defined the erratic political history of Puerto Rico were vividly evoked though out my childhood by monuments and celebrations set in the bay of my seaside hometown: the incursion of Spanish Conquistador Juan Ponce de Leon in 1508, the piedra (rock) that commemorates the invasion of Puerto Rico by General Miles in 1898 and the annual protest of the Partido Nacionalista Puertorriqueño (Puerto Rico’s Nationalist Party) against the US government in Puerto Rico are amongst the most remarkable memories of that time. A strong exposure to modernist painting began during my years as a graduate student in Philadelphia. What started as a rather conflictive relationship, proved to be a wealthy source for the development of my artistic discourse. Paintings like Le cuento una fábula a Jasper Johns (I tell a fable to Jasper Johns) propose a dialogue between the painting traditions that inform my work where formalism and narrative rely on each other for significance. This approach has produced a body of work mostly compose color fields and gesture drawing figures where family members (both dead and alive) become actors of a plot they cannot control. In the series of works entitled Rainy Season I...

Artwork