Edge at Eye: RQ.

patrick brennan
December 2019

American Dream ends with Jesse Owens and Luz Long, Acrylic on Canvas, 48 in x 36 in / 121 cm x 91 cm

Raquel Díaz is an oracular painter in that, while completely self-aware regarding her artistic  process, she, at the same time, “doesn’t know” exactly how it is that she paints what she paints as she paints.  Having relocated from her native Spain nearly six years ago, she’s completed more paintings since than she’s seen weeks in her adopted N.Y.C., which reveals something of the speed and urgency with which she works. What stands out among these paintings, at even a glance, is their abundant variety in composition, subject and pictorial strategy. There’s nothing rote or repetitive about any of them, although her distinct voice and sensibility nevertheless reverberates clearly within each.

American dream, Acrylic on canvas, 54 in x 48 in / 137 cm x 121 cm

In a moment where imagination is, more often than not, rationalized into acquiescence under the hostile takeover pressures that finance capital has imposed on both the conventional, marketized art-world as well as on a person’s means to subsistence (via gentrification), only a person with an inseparable need to apprehend lived experience by way of one’s art would persist where the margins for such activities have contracted so precariously. Having cultivated her art absent permissions from any academy, she works with a tremendous freedom that enables her to engage whatever comes to her, whether it be her pareidolia driven improvisations from a few years back or the intense, very person to person, narrative meditations that she’s pursuing in this moment.

Organic Ice Cream from America, Acrylic on Canvas, 62 in x 57 in / 157 cm x 144 cm

These paintings in particular function less as insular condensations than as focal vortices tencompassing characters, relationship, commentary and evaluation that flow through actual experience. This is also to say that each embeds within story. The images visible here of these paintings from the current exhibition form part of a series entitled American Dream, which the artist describes as a “social/cultural pictorial remark.”

American Dream II, Mixed Media on Canvas, 47 in x 53 in / 119 cm x 134 cm

American Dream by Raquel Díaz

From the crib to the grave
and the space in between

Limbs that grow
Teeth that fall

From the crib to the grave
there is time
that only watches and photographs can prove
to the dust of man.

The relation of the parts is the whole
and there is only communion from my fingernails to yours and beyond.

From the crib to the grave
there is a dream
with a need for unification
and brotherhood
because while limbs grow
and teeth fall
eyes should see it clearly…

RQ. Paintings
At Peace Gallery
554 Court Street, Brooklyn

The exhibition will be up until January 1, 2020
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Raquel Díaz
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