Rafael Melendez
Blackhearts Rave
2019

About the Item

Blackheart's Rave, 2019, Collage, Mixed media: Marker, Pencil, Drawing, Acrylic and Watercolour on gessoed shopping bag mounted on archival museum board in a Street Art styled bespoke oak wood frame. , 93.2 x 63.2 . 3.5 centimetres total dimension This Rave Dance club-inspired artwork takes the energy found in New York City's nightlife. Rafael Melendez - July 2022 Rafael Melendez (b.1970, USA) renders motifs from high past art with self-taught experimental techniques to produce an unexpected and highly unique visual language riddled with esoteric symbolism. The figures that inhabit his paintings are born from a desire to understand 'abnormal' worldviews, such as Outsider Art, transgressive fiction, and metaphysics. In a constantly evolving practice encompassing drawing, collage, and painting, Melendez strives to visualize/express a moment of unity between beauty and that which doesn't make sense. Melendez starts out as an installation and video artist in 1990s San Francisco. As a student for internationally acclaimed writer Kathy Acker and conceptual artist Nayland Blake at The San Francisco Art Institute, he increasingly questioned the artist's role in culture, focusing on concepts of the underground, nothingness and queerness through performance and installation art. San Francisco, a centre for queer culture, provided a wealth of resources for further research at libraries and alternative spaces. The culture was already advanced, and Melendez developed his practice on the backbone of widely varied takes on gender identity, masculinity, anti-art and philosophy. Acker and Blake had a significant role in Melendez's dream of developing his practice. His goal at the time is to evoke surreal environments through game-style visceral, temporary installations in the Dada style. Leaving San Francisco for New York City, Melendez adopts his practice to new living conditions and immerses himself in the romanticized East Village tradition of sex, drugs and rock and roll. First, basing himself in a one-bedroom tenement apartment on 7 Rivington Street, he keeps a journal of dreams and makes a series of minimalist drawings on paper while living the life of a single gay man in the early 00s NYC. In hindsight, Melendez sees these hybrid minimal dramatic drawings of abstracted teardrops, brick walls and word clusters as an experimental. This new drawing style is Melendez's attempt to create a unique anti-art style in what was quickly becoming an overcrowded art world of variations on the sameness and secondary market business dealings. Moreover, he felt the scene shut their door to him and his pursuits for lack of the right connections. Through perseverance, he embraced this as newfound freedom from the commercial restraints he witnessed at the many exhibitions he attended throughout the city. He continued his exploration of the creativity of the mind without gallery representation. His focus on self-awareness, humour and sexual themes was central to developing his voice and style at this time. And so, the series of stylized bodies came about—gender-ambiguous humanoids with multiple limbs and funky hairstyles and vice versa. The figures fill the pages of Melendez's sketchbooks and gradually appear in drawings and larger-scale paintings of city-dwellers with disproportional heads and androgynous figures, seen in isolation or in couples, are caught in compromised situations. In the early naughties, still living in New York, developing his practice away from the city's fast-moving world of arts, Melendez starts a series of large-scale works on paper combining geometry with elements of Dada collage. He increasingly explores automatic drawing as part of the execution of these works and looks at studies found in old sketchbooks. He also takes out the journals of dreams he kept as he first arrived in New York, using these as sources for motifs. Melendez soon becomes part of a circle of artists alongside which he starts to exhibit both works on paper and installations. Beginning in 2010, bi-coastal curator Edwin Ramoran included his work in a series of travelling group exhibitions which featured works by other emerging queer artists of colour. The works selected by Ramoran had a revolutionary dual playful yet aggressive quality; they were nothing like mainstream queer Chicano art in New York at the time. Inspired by concrete poetry, themes explored centred around cultural awareness, alienation, self-destructive patterns, and the historical links between these phenomena. A sense of displacement, both in gender identity and cultural heritage, brought the participating artists together, and most, Melendez amongst them, used a neo-narrative approach to communicate this experience. Around the same time, Melendez starts to explore text-based imagery. Using his signature coloured crayons, he combines words without an existing relation. These are musings on the elasticity of language, and the outcome is both political and lyrical and reflective of current moods. Melendez's started illegally subleasing a flat on 340 E. 13th Street that had become a hub for queer folk with daily visits by characters such as Ricardo Bracho and Ivan Monforte. Conversations were vivid and made up of phrases and expressions coined within these subcultures. Melendez picked up on these, half-participating, half-sketching, and they made their way into his notebooks. These are today part of the artist's archive and a record of a short-lasting time in the history of the New York City queer scene. In the summer of 2012, Melendez met his future husband, fashion stylist Jodie Barnes. The meeting will have a seminal impact on Melendez's artistic concerns and direction. Barnes draws on his experience in the fashion industry to encourage Melendez to produce and present new work, to build up an audience that understands and appreciates his practice. Melendez increasingly recognizes the value of his career and the thought invested in each drawing. In 2018 the couple relocated to London, UK, where Melendez continued his studio practice and staged his first solo presentation outside of the States in April 2022. In recent years, Melendez's two-dimensional work has become increasingly concerned with themes originating in Existentialism. He works with eradication methods, erasing lines made with a pencil or crayon, and creating a new image marked by deletion of information. The resultant pictures bring the erased writing to a notebook, signifying abandoned ideas and returning to a blank sheet. The absence of objective truth, knowledge, morality, values or meaning emerges as the new subject matter. So, the artist is right in summarising his recent work as a transformation of nihilistic convictions into visual representations. Existence and creativity are meditation and find their complete form in the process. This body of work contains a group of paintings with motifs appropriated from iconic, post-war American images. Again, the subject is the meditation on imagery art opens up for, either through looking or making. The quotation of existing, occasionally sacred imagery detaches the artist from his image, and there is room for humour. This new, lighthearted approach to established truths is Melendez's intrusion into a culture traditionally reserved for white heterosexual men. Ha!

Creator:

Rafael Melendez (1970, American)

Creation Year:

2019

Dimensions:

Height: 33.15 in (84.2 cm)Width: 24.89 in (63.2 cm)Depth: 1.38 in (3.5 cm)

Medium:

Gesso,Paper,Acrylic,Permanent Marker,Pencil

Movement & Style:

Contemporary

Period:

2010-