“Urgent Paintings” — Behind the Canvas
In August 2021, I received a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts (City Artists Corps); the grant was designed to support artists and revamp the art scene in New York City that was muted due to Covid-19. One of the grant conditions was to create in-person activities for our communities. It was a dream come true because coincidentally, from the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, I planned with my friend Benny Chueca to host an art show with our work whenever “things were back to normal.” We are still learning what “back to normal” will mean, but it was a unique opportunity to engage again with painting, an activity that is very close to my heart, and to host my second art show in New York City
My relationship with painting has always been on a gut level; there are no stories or concepts behind my work and no attempts at trying to analyze my paintings later (I hardly ever see them again when they are finished). I think they just reflect my personal context of the moment. The only thing that I define beforehand is the format (size), and the time I will dedicate to them; I think this is the only conscious decision of these paintings.
Around January 2020, I decided to start a new series of paintings. I had made my last series in 2012 (and the previous ones during the ’90s in Lima, Peru, where I am from). Unlike the previous series, this time, I wanted to explore a larger-scale format and to incorporate color.
So, in February 2020, I started working on the logistics of this new series (buying new materials, adapting my studio space for the dimensions of the artwork, etc.). In March 2020, when I finally placed the first piece of paper on a 4×6 ft piece of plywood, COVID-19 hit in New York.
Over the course of 2020 and 2021, from the isolation and solitude of my West Harlem apartment, I created 14 paintings, as I experienced and moved through past memories, growing anxiety and fear, and a very constrained dayto- day life. My artistic process was to take large paint brushes and dig them into black ink and apply them to the large sheets. I would then wait a few days to return to put color on each sheet. Each session was no more than thirty minutes; I would do only two sessions per piece. During the process, I would get immersed in the very physical application of the paint on the paper. It felt like a catharsis, more than ever, during this period. In the past, I had done very gestural black and white small drawings that observers likened to Chinese Calligraphy. This time, as I worked with black ink and colors on a large scale, I felt that my struggles and emotions were finding their way into the fiber of my paintings.
Death, panic, but, above all, uncertainty were what we all lived and breathed during the first months of the pandemic. Like many, I also experienced loss during this time, including the death of an important family member due to Covid-19 related events. Things happened very quickly and blended with the global tragedy and pain of which we were all part.
Still, I would not call this series of paintings COVID-19 paintings, nor do they try to represent in some way the personal and global tragedy that we are still living; they were simply made during this time. On reflection now, I would note that I continued with my intention to use color in the paintings, though one might think that during such a dark time, I would have reverted to only black ink.
On October 27, 2021, we welcomed more than 75 friends and art enthusiasts to our art show on West 14th Street (Meatpacking District, Manhattan) at the event space at La Nacional. In an ongoing sign of the times, the attendees had to provide proof of vaccination, and many wore masks that evening. But we finally publicly shared our works — our “Urgent Paintings.” Many of the attendees were friends and colleagues whom we had not seen for more than a year and a half, so it was a happy reunion. And in the process, the urgency and isolation of our pandemic emotions and artistic process led us into the joy of sharing our work with a supportive and welcoming community who embraced us and our art.
