José Lerma – El Pendejo

September 12 – October 24, 2009 

 

With "El Pendejo", we are pleased to present the first solo-show of the Puerto-Rican painter José Lerma in Germany.

"Back in Puerto Rico, I grew up in an apartment that had some ghastly brown tan and black shag carpet. Like for most kids of my generation, the living room carpet became a kind of creative playground where drawings were made and battles where reenacted with the best bird eye view available. The carpets were removed when at the age of eight I decided to paint them with enamel paint, to my parents dismay.

The current show revolves around the figure of the severely inbred King of Spain, Charles II and the pendejo or pubic hair motif. These are drawn on inexpensive largeloom and office carpets along transcriptions of drawings and text from my old notebooks. This keeps with a certain self-generating aspect of my work in which ideas that never executed are never tossed aside, but instead they emerge as decoration or text. The scale of the rugs affects the physical relationship of the viewer to the work. I like the thought of people walking over your ideas, convoluted and preliminary as they often are, and examining and stepping over an intimate space while simultaneously feeling small. Like having the same relationship an insect would have to a drawing - or of course a child to a carpet."  

José Lerma, born in Sevilla, Spain, lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.