Arnaldo Roche Rabell

(Puerto Rican, born 1955)

Arnaldo Roche Rabell is a Puerto Rican Neo-Expressionist painter whose symbolic work deals with issues of national identity, belonging, and childhood trauma. “I could not tell you whether part of my conscious or unconscious comes to life in these processes,” he has said. “I think of the idea for a work for months beforehand, it is the physical act of painting that the action of my work ratifies the urgency of my ideas, connecting all the actual elements I rub, print or project on the canvas. That is when the subconscious is released, materializing itself through digging, pasting, and tracing.” Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 1955, Roche Rabell studied architecture at the University of Puerto Rico before going on to receive his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1984. The artist currently lives and works in Puerto Rico. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Miami Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Juan, Puerto Rico, among others.