MIGUEL TRELLES

BIOGRAPHY

Miguel Trelles is a Puerto Rican visual artist who works in the Lower East Side of Manhattan at the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center, where he currently serves as Executive and Artistic Director of Teatro LATEA and is the co-founder, co-producer and head visual arts curator of the BORIMIX Puerto Rico Fest.

Trelles’ paintings and silk screens derive inspiration from dynastic Chinese painting along with Pre-Columbian and Latin American imagery.  An adjunct professor at Baruch College, Trelles has taught Studio Art at Hunter College and Brown University as well as Art History at Fairley Dickinson University and in several cities throughout China.

The work of Miguel Trelles has been exhibited in Rio de Janeiro, Lima, San Juan, Santo Domingo, Havana, Tegucigalpa, Buenos Aires, Paris, and Chengdu.  Trelles’ paintings are part of the permanent collections of El Museo del Barrio and Deutsche Bank in New York, the Fundacion Gabarrón in Valladolid and in El Museo de Arte de Ponce and the Institue of Puerto Rican Culture in San Juan.

STATEMENT

a Pan-American suma

 Rather than pursuing radical innovations, I favor revolutionary archaism in painting. Personally meaningful references from dynastic Chinese painting, pre-Columbian Maya vases and Latin American popular folklore and culture are “telescoped” into paintings, drawings and prints with the conceptual aim of enriching our contemporary visual sensibility with powerful indigenous, Afro-Caribbean and non Western references. By referencing the Caribbean’s African heritage, and by delving into Latin America’s Pre-Columbian cultural wealth while respectfully approaching Chinese sources (chino-latino), my work is an evolving draft towards a Pan-American suma.

ROOM 303

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