Over the past decade my work has primarily explored the history of the Puerto Rican diaspora in New York. The early non-sequential drawings began as an elegy to past lives and a formal meditation on the inherent nature of abstraction in photography. I referenced vintage photographs of my ancestors and methodically added layers of graphite on paper to mimic their character and activate the flatness of the print. The often fuzzy or diffuse quality of the print translated into a 'sfumato' effect and tricked the viewer's eye into believing the drawings were photographs. As the viewer's perception shifted and the work was seen as a drawing, its formal qualities brought reflection and meaning to a historically stigmatized Latino culture.
Subsequently, I turned my attention to captured stills from old 8mm film to develop sequential paintings and drawings. The capture and manipulation of analog film through digital media fueled an investigation into spontaneous responses to the camera that advanced beyond a single snapshot of plaintive memory to reflections of time and movement. The character studies of my ancestors and the historical environments in which they lived shifted my focus to the challenges of displacement from their homeland and the meaning of the symbols of freedom and opportunity they encountered.
I am currently producing Open Letter to a Libelist, an independent film that investigates the inception and duration of Puerto Rico's early 20th century colonial history through the legacy of my grandfather Ruperto Udenburgh—a pioneer and activist who emigrated from Puerto Rico to New York in 1927.
Rainier Rochlitz Excerpt:
"When reproduced by a painter, almost identically so to speak, a photograph which was taken without any artistic intention, for instance a family snapshot, undergoes transformation. The photographer is often unable to determine beforehand the elements which appear in his visual field either as a whole or in their spatiality, and, without subsequent manipulation, is unable to hinder the involuntary reproduction of certain amongst them in the shot. On the other hand, when the painter reproduces these same elements, their presence stems from deliberation alone which is so total as to affect the very space in which they are set. In that way, he confers upon them both a meaning and an exemplary value, an emblematic status which attracts the viewer"s attention. This value is proper, as a constitutive claim, to the painter"s works, whether he reproduces photographs or not. But when he does, the contrast between the two media is all the more salient; the medium of exemplary meaning reduces the testimony from factual existence to its function as pure image."
Rainier Rochlitz, "Where We Have Got To," Photography and Painting in the Work of Gerhard Richter, 1998