Miguel Ángel Payano Jr.

By combining humour with the grotesque, Miguel Ángel Payano Jr. creates unsettling surrealist imagery that recalls the illusionistic portraiture of the 16th-century Milanese painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo as well as mid-millennium Singerie paintings. The multimedia works incorporate elements of painting, collage and relief sculpture, while their elaborate execution explores deeper questions relating to socio-linguistics and acculturation. The works are enriched with unexpected materials such as glitter, money, bottle caps, synthetic and natural hair, joints and phone covers, which are imbued with their own cultural significance. Throughout his expansive practice, Payano’s creative process includes several stages of deconstruction and reconstruction. The artist contemplates, “For me, arriving at the finished artwork is a process of disruption and discovery.” 

Drawing on his Caribbean heritage, training in New England and decades spent in China, Payano’s work reflects how his identity has shifted and expanded along the way, collapsing and combining these different worlds. His transcultural practice is inspired by the idea of  “triple-consciousness” – an expansion of W.E.B. DuBois’ concept of “double-consciousness”, a theory of African-American cultural dissonance. Payano constantly analyses his own actions through the lens of his multiple cultural identities. The complexity of his compositions becomes a visual representation of the cultural shift that occurs during the creative process. This results in works that are conceptually multi-layered and visually striking, inviting viewers to look more closely and reexamine their initial interpretations.

Payano’s subjects seem to be caught between multiple realms, in immersive compositions where hallucinatory worlds weave in and out of each other, exploding in vibrant colour at their friction points. In a communion between the body and nature, his figures are often intertwined with landscapes where ape-like creatures are captured in the space of becoming. Alongside natural motifs including sparrows, butterflies and bees, mouths grow into ripe peaches on branches. The mouth is a characteristic element in the artist’s works and he often refers to these luscious-lipped fruit as a “single-celled human”. Referring back to acculturation, the mouth as our primary tool of communication becomes a way to consider the formative impact of language and social networks on our identities.