GenNext is a strong showing, providing a sense of each artist’s formidable talents and how they use their techniques to experiment within the confines of established artistic norms.
Artist Vincent Telles has exhibited his work in the Traditional Spanish Market, the annual event on the Santa Fe Plaza that features works by hundreds of artists working with Spanish Colonial art forms. Telles paints traditional bultos and retablos, but his works in rendered in a customary style, combine religious imagery with contemporary pop culture references, particularly superheroes. For example, a retablo, depicts Jesus, Mary, and Joseph as caped crusaders flying through the sky.
Religious icons are reimagined in a graphic street style by Thomas Vigil, who renders images on repurposed street signs and other reclaimed materials using spray paint. His a portrait of Jesus Christ, gleans its title from the biblical passage that describes the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel’s vision of God. It is a vivid rendering with heavy contrasts and saturated colors. So too is his rendition of Our Lady of Sorrows, ,an impactful, intensely colored portrait that features swords piercing the Virgin’s heart that pop out at the viewer, sharply contrasting with the tender sorrow of her gaze.
Patrick McGrath Muñíz works in the style of colonial-era paintings influenced by the Spanish Baroque and Rococo. The elaborately carved settings for his compositions recall the stately, ornate frames and altarpieces that contained the history paintings and religious-themed works associated with Spanish Colonialism in his native Puerto Rico as well as in New Mexico. He adds anachronistic details to his narrative imagery. The scenes he paints may be contemporary, but he uses the language of the past, contrasting the materialism of consumer culture with the spiritual concerns of religion. In
he draws a sharp parallel between the idolatrous nature of pop culture worship and religious iconography, establishing a sense of satiric irony. The painting — a conflation of pop culture and religious and mythic imagery — was made in
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