Puerto Rican Naive Art is Rising in the International Art Market

Miguel Hernández Santurce, Puerto Rico Puerto Rican Primitive Artist

Considered a primitive post-modern artist, Miguel Hernández ‘s work cultivates this genre almost from the beginning of his career. He was greatly influenced through primitive Haitian art, especially in his first direct contacts with art through the work of the Spanish painter Angel Botello Barros, whose influence can be appreciated directly in visits to his workshop. From his first exposure to plastic arts, he instinctively begins his self-taught formation and then approached the Puerto Rican painter Jorge Rechani (1981) in search of extending his knowledge of oil painting.

After two years under his guidance, Miguel Hernández obtains pastel painting courses with the painter Bart Mayol later to enroll with the Liga de Arte de San Juan studying with the abstract painter Raul Zayas. He continues his self-taught formation until deciding to take Graphic Arts, Photography and Publicity courses, which it leads him to become a graphic artist for many of the advertising agencies of San Juan. Eventually he is able to take several trips to the Dominican Republic and Haiti where he studies and gathers influences of the art and coloring of the painting from the Haitian teachers.

His art is obviously marked by the influence and experiences of his native town of Santurce in Puerto Rico, where he gathers all the folklore that characterizes his work and the big African Antillean influence that is perceived in his art, giving him a universal sense to his work that arises from the spontaneity with which it develops personages and situations of his local environment projecting them across the magic of the oil towards a wider dimension, without it losing the simple-mindedness and the Caribbean color that characterizes his work.