Ivelisse Jimenez is a woman who takes her time to dig deeply into what she studies. She needs a rhythm in life, not a hectic one for seeking fast success or mass production. At her pace, she has developed solid and notable work in abstract art.

Despite having studied performing arts at the University of Puerto Rico, her career took momentum after she left to New York in the mid 90’s when she applied for a job as a teacher from a want ad she saw in a Puerto Rico newspaper.

Jimenez moved to New York with her partner Actor Teofilio Torres and besides teaching at a high school, she took courses at the Liga de Estudiantes de Arte in New York to polish her skills in painting, drawing, and sculpturing. “This is when I started to understand what technique meant, to develop a love for the job, and to also have peace,” Jimenez said.

Similar to Requena, her first pieces in New York were figurative paintings. “Even though it had to do with identity, it also had more to do with being a novice,” said Jimenez. She travelled frequently to feature her work in Puerto Rico. Jimenez’s impressive portfolio of work got her admitted into the master’s program of art at New York University and that’s when a drastic change happened in her artistic view.

“I erased all paintings that I had completed or were in progress, except for those already sold,” said Jimenez. “I wanted to see everything white because I felt there were too many influences in family and politics, especially from an island where everyone is battling for identity. I wanted to work with more forms and silence and wanted to understand where those affluences are formed; so I eliminated everything and began to relate to abstract language.”

Jimenez’ abstract work in paintings as well as in her installation of mixed media, shot quickly into international fame in 1999 with a series of exhibits, where she was invited by mentors at NYU like Japanese Artist Shirley Kaneda and critic Saul Ostrow. At these exhibits world renowned abstract artists like Peter Haley and Diana Cooper participate.

“It was a great start for me, different people got to see my work and I would receive invitations like the one from Jacobo Carpio, who had an important gallery in Costa Rica and Miami and who always participated at these types of fairs,” Jimenez said.

Since then, Jimenez has participated in renowned exhibitions and art fairs such as the Prague Quadrennel, Cuenca International Biennial in Ecuador, Museo del Barrio in NY, and in Mexico, and Spain. She was one of the guest artists to present an individual exhibit at the prestigious ARCO, International Contemporary Art Fair in Madrid and one of her pieces was acquired in 2004 by the Museo de Burgos also in Spain.

That era of chaos and world visibility came to a climax in 2008 when according to Jimenez “felt burnt out” and her father was also sick, so she decided to return to Puerto Rico.

“It wasn’t a crash with my creative work instead with the art world,” said Jimenez. “It’s a process when your work is successful and you’re being recognized. You think you’re doing well but it’s not an intellectual respect rather an economic one about how many pieces you can make, how many can be sold, and how you can sell your image.”

She confessed being pressured by multiple galleries that represented her work in Europe and Latin America. “Everyone wanted to guide me in a direction that I didn’t want to go,” Jimenez said. Instead she opted to end her relationship with most art galleries. “It was almost a suicidal decision but it’s one I do not regret. I am very astute and I had to experiment and live another way in order to continue my work.”

Jimenez has proceeded to work on her paintings as well as her installations that use a variety of construction materials along with plexiglass, plastic, and junk thrown out by people. Jimenez has a preference of using defected items. “Maybe I use pieces of colored tape that look beautiful from a distance and when you get up close notice they are torn, and defected, it’s something that I am passionate about.”

Today Jimenez is 50, and feels mature enough to take her work to next level. “Even though I don’t care if my work transcends, the only thing that matters is that I enjoy a process of showing an idea because I have a good time doing what I like,” Jimenez said.

Jimenez showcases her work in Europe and has won important awards. In the U.S. she won the Joan Mitchell Award in painting and the “Laguna Art” contest in Venice, California.

The Museum of Art of Puerto Rico and the Museo de Burgos has permanent art pieces by Jimenez and the rest of her work travels to international fairs and art exhibits.

Interested in buying work by Ivelisse Jimenez, you can visit Diana Lowenstein Gallery at 2043 North Miami Ave. in Miami, Fla, or call (305) 576-1804, or visit Zawara Alejandro Gallery at 1615 Cerra St. in San Juan, or enter www.zawara-alejandro.com.

Artwork created by Samuel Lind Hernandez is inseparable to his roots at Barrio (district) Mediania Alta in Loiza, the most important epicenter of Afro-Puerto Rican culture. Lind was raised in a palm grove in between the road and the beach eating crabs and cassava and drinking coconut milk. He was given paper by his uncle to make notebooks and sketch the people of the town.  High energy bomba dances comprised of sensual moves, famous in Loiza as well as the festive processions and religious traditions in honor of Patron Saint San Miguel Arcangel, provided the inspiration for his first paintings as an adolescent and can still be seen in his art today.

“My first formal painting was of a bomba dance, that is very powerful here; I had that sense of wanting to capture this dance graphically with all of its energy and force,” said the 63-year-old Lind during an interview from his workshop in Loiza, where he has lived and worked his entire life.

At San Juan’s School of Plastic Arts, where he paid for his studies offering drum lessons at several local churches; Lind studied the techniques of painting, sculpture, and silk screen painting.

“It (School of Plastic Arts) served to learn the basics and history of art, which is important, but nothing took me away from my perception of who I was. I was too attached to my heritance; I was born in a house where a saint is maintained…I had an upbringing here that was my world, my universe,” Lind said. Maintaining a saint is part of the tradition in Loiza where the statue of San Miguel Arcangel guarded the house of a distinguished family in the community, who had the right to take care of it and was responsible to take it to the annual processions during the month of July.

“What differentiates my work is that I am very regionalist but now that’s ‘in’ according to the world of art,” Lind said. “Today this distinctiveness gives the artist more value. When I was at the School of Plastic Arts some would say my work wouldn’t transcend because it was too folkloric.” It was a derogatory comment, reproaching at times his desire to project his Afro-Puerto Rican culture.

“But I didn’t believe it because I understood that art is a human expression where one is free to express themselves…I have a definite black cause in my work, it is what I lived. I see it with grandeur…I work at a level where I seek quality, expression, and immersed energy and whovever gets it, gets it.”

Lind considers himself an eclectic artist as far as his painting style, use of technique, pointillism concepts and the impressionism and cubism inside a figurative design, which has strengthened his own pictorial language from these elements.

Since his early days, Lind has featured his work abroad and has presented at museums and galleries in Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Cleveland, among others. In Puerto Rico you can appreciate his work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santurce. In these past years he has stopped selling his art through gallery circuits and prefers to attend potential buyers and art collectors directly who find him through his website or visit his workshop.

One of his most recent satisfying international experiences was his participation as a guest artist at the African Festival of the Arts in Chicago where he had an exhibit.

Interested in purchasing work by Samuel Lind, you can visit Samuel Lind Studio situated on Road PR-187 km 6.6, in Loiza or call (787) 876-1494.

Aixa Requena began her career making paintings of large format, figurative, and expressionism with the use of intense colors. Her first individual exhibit took place at the Liga de Estudiantes de Arte de San Juanin the late 1980’s. Then her creativeness took a different turn and she began to make art with a particular technique mixing photography with paint.

“After that exhibit I was curious about photography; I did not want to create a collage, I wanted to print directly on the fabric as if it was just another pigment of paint. After it was printed on the fabric, I would paint it. It was kind of a mix media art,” said Requena, who took that technique a step further and developed it on wood and metal surfaces.

Two of her projects more representative of this stage included the series of Antilles Textures based on the architecture of the region, and the Caribbean Virgins, a tribute to the tropical woman. Antilles Textures was the base of one of the most important art exhibits made by Requena, which took place in 1999 at the UNESCO exhibition hall in Paris.

The Caribbean Virgins was a more feminist and poetic piece, while Antilles Textures was more political based on culture and history. Its style included some architecture fragments of wood, Caribbean homes, and Old San Juan walls; all having some layers of history,” said Requena, who was born in Old San Juan and also has her workshop there.

In early 2000, Requena moved to New York where she earned a master’s degree in art at Hunter College and began a new era in her creative work. She worked more with installation art and videos. One of her early works was called “Between Spaces,” a piece with scenagraphy that consisted of a subway train car with paintings, video, and ephemeral sculptures.

Requena’s art particularly her celebrated Antilles Textures can be seen at the Museum of Art of Puerto Rico, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, both situated in Santurce. Also, the Museum of Latinamerican Art in Los Angeles, the Univeristy of Notre Dame in Indiana, and the Museo del Barrio in New York display some of her pieces.

Today, Requena began again to develop a mix of photography but this time incorporating new ideas, which has transformed her work. “I have returned to photography and converted it into a painting but with other foundations; I am working with transparent surfaces, and assembling them on top of eachother,” Requena said.

To buy work by Aixa Requena, you can visit Atelier Aixa Requena in Old San Juan, or call (787) 722-1782 or send an email to [email protected].

When Rafael Trelles was age 11, he was quiet yet perceptive and was always drawing and painting everything he saw with a unique talent; which is why his mother took him to the home of Julio Yort, a master artist and Catalan restorer, who was a friend of the infamous chellist Pablo Casals.

After taking short tests, Yort embraced the child, who was the only one among his college students. “I remember helping him open boxes that arrived via mail and had written on them the Metropolitan Museum of Art and I did not know what that was; I had no idea he restored paintings for the museum and was an important artist or restorer,” Trelles said.

In less than two years, the master artist cultivated a valuable seed in his young pupil. “Besides teaching me the fundamentals of drawing and painting, Yort taught me something that I never learned from another master which was the love for the profession, a sense that you belong to a historic group of people who have dedicated their lives to painting, drawing, and sculpturing,” said Trelles, who is currently one of Puerto Rico’s most recognized artists.

After completing his bachelor’s degree at the University of Puerto Rico, Trelles decided to study at the National Autonomous University of Mexico to pursue his postgraduate degree in art in search of cultural roots and Latin American mythology.

Trelles’ paintings are perceived like an atmosphere of dreams and fantasy creatures passing through imaginary landscapes that defy the conventional sense of reality. “There are elements of surrealism but I identify my work more with magical realism, which is a movement in Latin American literature,” Trelles said. “The Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, one of the creators of this concept, used to say that the difference between the European and the Latin American was that the European had to search for that alternate reality in his subconscious, and the Latin American’s reality is magical.”

Trelles claims myths have been converted into a central aspect of his work. “People say that the study of myths is something passé but for me it continues to be important.”

In 1991, Trelles adopted a surrealism technique that served as the base for his paintings. He began to create enigmatic figures and mystical characters, magicians, psychotics, and monsters in his paintings. This stage went on for 20 years until he had a strong influence of baroque referring to the use of several contrasting elements and vibrant colors.

Trelles has showcased individual exhibits at the Museum of Art in Bayamon (2012) and the Puerto Rican Workshop Gallery in Philadelphia (2011).

Even though he is considered a fundamental painter and draftsman, Trelles has dabbled in the areas of urban installations and diverse techniques in print. From this he began one of his most celebrated projects called “In Concrete: Urban Graphics” using a technique he invented where he etches designs by using a pressure water hose and plastic stencils on concrete that has been blackened with fungus and dirt from being exposed to the elements. The design emerges when the water cleans the dirty surface through the holes in the stencils.

Trelles presented this technique at the San Juan Poly/Graphic Triennial, after creating art in the barrios of San Juan; he developed another for the Museum of Art in Ponce.

Then he was invited by ACE of Bueno Aires, an international graphic center, to create designs in concrete inspired by the literary work of Julio Cortazar, from there he attended projects in Cuba and the International Douro Graphic Arts Biennial in Portugal where he continued his tradition to inspire with his graphic art with literary images, this time those of Portuguese Nobel prize winner Jose Saramago. Besides developing “In Concrete” directly with other countries, Trelles has collected a documentation of photos and videos of his work that has developed into an independent artistic representation and has been presented in museums and art centers in New York, Boston, California, Ecuador, and Lithuania, among other places.

“This is my most travelled project and the one that has acquired recognition outside of Puerto Rico. I have affection for it since it tends to surprise people and its fun to do,” said Trelles.

Trelles’ work is represented at many of the most important museums in Puerto Rico including the Museum of Art of Puerto Rico, where his painting Exodo II is prominent, and the Museum of Art in Ponce as well as the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Trelles uses this newest urban graphic installation as a means to talk about social and political conditions in Puerto Rico and the world. But when he wants to express himself more privately, he prefers to work on his painting and drawings.

Interested in purchasing work by Rafael Trelles, enter www.rafaeltrellesonline.com or (787) 309-9052.