Katherine Bernhardt and José Luis Vargas

José Luis Vargas spent many years travelling and studying abroad before settling back in Puerto Rico, his native country, in 1998. His current studio is relatively isolated in a remote area in the hills in the central part of the island. The drive up there takes you through a lush tropical landscape past many houses ruined and left abandoned after Hurricane Maria in 2017. His studio there has expanded to take over his mother’s old house that she left after Hurricane Maria. Though very much now an artist studio, somewhat chaotic and filled everywhere with paintings, drawings, and his supermarket trolley assemblage sculptures it still has the aura of a recently inhabited domestic space. It seems an ideally immersive work place for an artist who has long held an interest in memory, ancestors, as well as the supernatural and the super-powered. Talking to Vargas you understand he has a deep knowledge of Puerto Rico, while the books in his studio and the many piles of photos and photocopies show a diverse interest in wider cultural practices, including a specific fascination with Voodoo.

“Puerto Rico is an important reference for me but it’s not enough. My paintings reference the wider Caribbean and Africa. Because of the history colonisation and slavery the Caribbean is such an interesting and complex meeting point for cultures and I believe that Caribbean people, especially Puerto Ricans, do not fully understand and value what we have in our DNA, what we have in our spiritual inheritance. For instance for me Haitian Voodoo is not Voodoo without African Voodoo. You have to go to the roots and work through the layers.” José Luis Vargas

In a related way, while many of Katherine Bernhardt’s paintings catalogue the quotidian stuff of her everyday life, her art is not bounded by America’s shores. It was her travels in Morocco and discovering the patterned rugs of the Berbers, alongside her appreciation of the saturated colours and unexpected motif pairings found in Dutch wax printing on African fabrics that first set her on way towards making her pattern paintings for which she has become widely known. She has recently spent several months Guatemala. But Puerto Rico has a special hold over Bernhardt. It’s not hard to see how the vibrancy, and the tropical plants and fauna of the Caribbean would be attractive to an artist whose aesthetic is so closely attuned to bright colours.

“I love the hot weather, being surrounded by lush plants and melting from sweat. It feels good. I also like to see the colour of fruit there. All of the colours look brighter there in the Caribbean light.” KB

In Vargas’ paintings the colours seems partly familiar and partly evocative of a Caribbean folk art palette. The imagery however is very much his own with the spiritual, the personal, the supernatural and science fiction all collapsed into one non-hierarchical field. There is a leveling out too of medium and styles with his paintings being a combination of naive elements, photo-collage, parietal gestures, words written out in cartoon speech bubbles and the addition of ad hoc materials. Some paintings are created on unstretched burlap giving them the feeling of street action banners. Others are pinned to the wall and loaded up with layers of paint.

An often-repeated motif is a strange looking lizard – the Garadiablo – a mythical blood sucking creature that is part of Puerto Rican folklore. It is described as having the face of a bat the skin of a shark and a humanlike body and at certain periods there have been enough reported sightings for it seem real and strike genuine fear in people. The ability for this supernatural being to become real in the collective consciousness imparts the Garadiablo with a particular significance for Vargas. Likewise UFOs – also a recurring motif – which for many people also are real.

“Every painting I do is like a thesis of something I believe in, or something about my identity – it’s the opening and the conclusion of some kind of statement about life. When I paint a UFO it’s about a childhood memory when in our neighborhood we all saw a UFO and we still talk about it and it’s also about how much do we stretch our imagination when it comes to the unknown. A UFO is like a metaphor for those unidentified elements that make up history that need to be understood, researched, and origins found. But I am an artist not a historian, and artists shouldn’t give everything away. There is a certain element of mystery in my paintings that is there for people to find out themselves.” JVL

Considering the amount of time Bernhardt has spent in Puerto Rico and considering the immediacy in the choice of her subjects there is an inevitability that bottles of Heinz Mayochup would find their way into in her work. And while her main desire is to make challengingly inventive formal paintings, in some way her paintings do have a diaristic element, and this is not entirely incidental.

“I’ll pick a couple of things I want to make a painting of, like hammerheads, Malta India and tostones. The selection is totally random. After I’ve chosen the components, I’ll make a giant drawing on the canvas with spray paint. I actually make the painting on the floor, so it’s more fluid and watery. I add tons of water into the paint to make it more liquid. I’m thinking about daily life, about products and things that we use. I’m thinking about stuff at the deli, things like that. But really they’re just good colors and shapes. Look at a sock: it’s got really good colours, white with red and blue stripes. Toilet paper is a squarish oval.

A cigarette is a line. A dorsal fin is a triangle, and so is a Dorito. My work is always a response to my life and what I’m interested in at the time. I paint Puerto Rico-themed things because I’m currently obsessed with Puerto Rico and would love to move there and live there full time”. KB