James Reyes (b. 1991) is a Puerto Rican American artist who lives and works in the Bronx, New York. Reyes’s works are directly inspired by his cultural and social environment as well as the dream world. Using intensely gestural and occasionally chaotic brushstrokes, splashes, drips, sprays, and scrapes, Reyes conjures figures both fully rendered and surreal, creating portals into his subconscious and to the dream world. His mesmerizing interplay between figuration and abstraction mimics the surreal nature of dreams and memory where everything and nothing is happening all at once.  Reyes’s process is reactive and intuitive using broad action packed gestures as a cryptic map to pull out the characters and symbols, allowing the abstraction of the underpainting to act a guide into his world.  The push and pull between the layers of the work mirrors memory and imagination, where some moments are crystal clear while others fade into swirls of abstraction. 

 

Reyes received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York, and has since exhibited at numerous galleries, museums and fairs across the U.S.