In the last few years, Roche has grattaged and frottaged himself often, and has used his own likeness as a mainstay on most of his blue works. This is not new. Almost from the start, Roche has used the self-portrait to comment on his own life, on Puerto Rico’s political plight, and on the present state of the world. He has projected his persona on his art merging his self-portrait with his still-lifes and landscapes. For example, in 2009, upon reading a special report to the President of the United States indicating that, according to law, the US Congress retained all powers of the People of Puerto Rico, save for “matters of purely local concern”, the artist became aware of the extreme frailty of public and private property on our island, he hired a truck, took all his furniture and belongings to his studio, put them on the floor face-up, and grattaged them on a huge sheet of heavy paper stock. Along the border to the paper, he also grattaged a strong rope that functioned as a frame and that also “tied” all his belongings together. This work, titled The Pursuit of Happiness (2009), is a life-size still-life, actually a vanitas, where the artist’s most beloved and precious objects take the place of his likeness —those things that reveal and contain and expose his personality— thus becoming a symbolic self-portrait. The still life and the self-portrait merge to denounce the political power of the US Congress upon the bodies and the property of all Puerto Ricans on the island. In order to keep his belongings secure, the artist decided to store them in a work of art that would always be his, also by force of another federal act: the Copyright Law!
showcases his style —not his semblance—, his signature, his manner of painting: the face becomes the place where personal style itself becomes the artwork’s subject. Self-portraits —like, for example, Rembrandt’s, Vincent van Gogh’s, and Lucian Freud’s— are theoretical statements, arguments on the what and the why of their art. The self-portrait has nothing to do with holding a mirror up to one’s face, but with pushing forth the subjective and very-own pictorial manner of the artist.
It bears noting that Roche’s preference for the self-portrait and the still life have much to do with his view of the world and the subject-object-world relationship, as I have suggested in previous essays and comments1. Why has Roche decided to 1 Lilliana Ramos Collado. “Ecce Pictor: Arnaldo Roche Rabell’s Sacrificial Blue”. In Omar Pascual Castillo, Arnaldo Roche Rabell En Azul: Señales después del tacto. Gran Canaria: CAAM (2015). Lilliana Ramos Collado. “Empuje y resistencia: Autorretratos de Arnaldo Roche Rabell.” Visión Doble, June 15, 2015 http://www.visiondoble. net/2015/06/15/empuje-y-resistencia-autorretratos-de-arnaldo-roche-rabell/ . Lilliana Ramos Collado, “Un jardín de Arnaldo Roche Rabell”. Visión Doble, June 15, 2014, http://www.visiondoble.net/2014/06/15/un-jardin-de-arnaldo-roche-rabell-en-el-mapr/ . Lilliana Ramos Collado. “Un 63