Miguel Trelles

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I favor revolutionary archaism in art. Personally meaningful references and amenable formats from the history of art, film and sequential art help me to depict and to frame intuitions. Those references are then “telescoped” into conceptual yet sensuous drawings and prints.

A Caribbean provenance has heightened my awareness of the dichotomies between the art and culture of the four Americas: Pre-Columbian, Colonial, and contemporary South and North America. My work straddles “the tremendous potential energy of difference” that Europe unleashed between the four Americas and aims for a Pan-American suma, honoring the vast range of diversity in the Americas.

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Miguel Trelles is a Puerto Rican visual artist with an extensive exhibition record across the Americas, Europe and China. Trelles works in the Lower East Side of Manhattan at the Clemente Soto Velez Cultural and Educational Center.

Trelles’ paintings straddle figurations and landscapes in brightly colored or monochromatic compositions. Whereas his Chino-Latino painting series derives inspiration from dynastic Chinese painting, a new Mesoamerican Pop series taps Pre-Columbian imagery, infusing it with 20th century pop idioms from Latin America and the United States.

An adjunct professor at City Tech and Baruch College, Trelles has taught Studio Art at Hunter College and Brown University as well as Art History at Fairley Dickinson University and in several cities throughout China. For several years Miguel Trelles also taught Spanish at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven.

The work of Miguel Trelles has been exhibited in Miami, Rio de Janeiro, Lima, San Juan, Santo Domingo, Havana, Tegucigalpa, Buenos Aires, Paris, and Chengdu. Trelles’ paintings are part of the permanent collections of The Frost Art Museum (FIU) in Miami, El Museo del Barrio and Deutsche Bank in New York, the Fundación Gabarrón in Valladolid and in El Museo de Arte de Ponce and the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture in San Juan. In Puerto Rico, Trelles is represented by Petrus Gallery, San Juan.