JOSÉ LERMA - WWW.MIERGALLERY.COM 7277 SANTA MONICA BOULEVARD LOS ANGELES, CA, 90042 T: 323-498-5957 - Nino Mier Gallery

JOSÉ LERMA

INFO@MIERGALLERY.COM
WWW.MIERGALLERY.COM
7277 SANTA MONICA BOULEVARD
LOS ANGELES, CA, 90042
T: 323-498-5957

José Lerma (b.1971) is a multimedia artist who works primarily in portraiture.
Lerma’s practice is most responsive to not only the social and material conditions
of the cities he inhabits, but also to the works of art put on display by their
institutions. He has described his practice as akin to that of a landscape painter,
turning his eye into a sieve able to distill and record telling details about worlds
physically proximate to him. Of particular interest to Lerma is art history, and
how artistic representation produces social and political power. His recent suite
of portraits is known for its rejection of character psychology and its distinctively
haptic materiality, produced with a custom-mixed acrylic paint that allows for a
signature impasto.

Lerma is currently an Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of
Chicago, where he has taught since 2009. He has had over twenty solo exhibitions
at galleries such as Kavi Gupta in Chicago, IL (2020, 2017, 2014), Galerie Xavier
Hufkens in Brussels, Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York, NY (2014, 2010, 2006,
2004), and at museums such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2014),
and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (2013) His works are represented
in numerous collections, including The Saatchi Collection in London, the Museum
of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

SELECTED WORKS

José Lerma
 Quiquito, 2022
Acrylic on burlap
   32 x 24 in
  81.3 x 61 cm

José Lerma
  Buho, 2022
Acrylic on burlap
   32 x 24 in
  81.3 x 61 cm

José Lerma
  Adela, 2022
Acrylic on burlap
   32 x 24 in
  81.3 x 61 cm

José Lerma
Jaqueline, 2022
Acrylic on burlap
    72 x 48 in
 182.9 x 121.9 cm

José Lerma
   Ruben, 2022
Acrylic on burlap
    72 x 48 in
 182.9 x 121.9 cm

José Lerma
  Olguita, 2022
Acrylic on burlap
    72 x 48 in
 182.9 x 121.9 cm

José Lerma
Anaelvira 2, 2022
Acrylic on burlap
   32 x 24 in
  81.3 x 61 cm

José Lerma
   Rey, 2022
Acrylic on burlap
   32 x 24 in
  81.3 x 61 cm

INSTALLATION VIEWS

Installation view of José Lerma’s
           Ut Queant Laxis
 (August 14 - September 11 2021)
Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

Installation view of José Lerma’s
           Ut Queant Laxis
 (August 14 - September 11 2021)
Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

Installation view of José Lerma’s
           Ut Queant Laxis
 (August 14 - September 11 2021)
Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

Installation view of José Lerma’s
           Ut Queant Laxis
 (August 14 - September 11 2021)
Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

Installation view of José Lerma’s
           Ut Queant Laxis
 (August 14 - September 11 2021)
Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

Installation view of José Lerma’s
           Ut Queant Laxis
 (August 14 - September 11 2021)
Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

PRESS

February 2022

Minimal Strokes Applied with a Broom
Form Jose Lerma’s Tactile Portraits
By Grace Ebert

To create his thick, abstract portraits, Chicago-based artist Jose Lerma trades his brush for hefty,
commercial brooms that follow the lines of preliminary sketches. “The process of these paintings
is laborious. I make my own paint and fabricate my supports. The material is heavy and unwieldy,”
he tells Colossal. “It is done in one shot because it dries very fast, so there is a minimal margin for
mistakes.”

Lerma’s impasto works shown here have evolved from his original series of Paint Portraits, which
revealed the general outline of a figure without any distinctive details. Wide swaths trace the
length of the subject’s hair or neck, leaving ridges around the perimeter and a solid gob of pigment
at the end of each stroke. His forward-facing portraits tend to split the figure in half by using
complementary shades of the same color to mirror each side of a face.

With a background in social sciences, history, and law, much of Lerma’s earlier pieces revolved around
translating research into absurd, childlike installations and more immersive projects. “In recent works,
maybe due to returning to my home in Puerto Rico and a much more relaxed non-academic setting,
I have eliminated my reliance on history and research and now concentrate on just making portraits,”
he shares. “It’s an approachable, tactile, and disarming aesthetic, but the absurdity remains perhaps
in the excessive materiality.”

Now, Lerma “works in reverse” and begins with a specific image that he reduces to the most minimal
markings. “It’s a large work painted in the manner of a small work, and I think that has the psychological
effect of making the viewer feel small, more like a child,” he says.

Living and working between Puerto Rico and Chicago, where he teaches at the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago, Lerma currently has paintings on view in a number of shows: he’s at Yusto/Giner in
Málaga through March 24 and part of the traveling LatinXAmerican exhibition. In April, he’ll be showing
with Nino Mier Gallery at Expo Chicago and in May at Galeria Diablo Rosso in Panama. Until then, see
more of his works on Instagram.

September 2021

Ut Queant Laxis: A Conversation with Jose Lerma
By Sasha Bogojev

Nino Mier gallery in LA is currently running the final week of Jose Lerma’s debut solo show Ut
Queant Laxis. Borrowing the title from the Latin hymn in honor of John the Baptist, the suite of works
comprising this extraordinary presentation introduces new takes on the portraiture form developed
by the Seville-born artist.

As fans of figuration we’ve been enjoying watching Lerma using the archetypal depiction of a person
to experiment with the most fundamental elements of painting and employing paint’s materiality
beyond its original design. It’s this particular quality of his process that inspired the title of a show,
repurposing the name of a monophonic chant often used for teaching singing because of its way
of using successive notes of the scale. Puerto Rico-based artist saw it fitting to entitle his debut
and introduce his practice with the same name, matching the stoic atmosphere of his work with the
timeless vibe of Latin language.

The idiom “less is more” certainly applies to Lerma’s work, but only when talking about the formative
elements of the painting. The form, the color palette, the composition, the paint application and
manipulation, everything is reduced to its most basic structure. The shape of a face and/or the body
is depicted as a slob of paint, the composition is simplified to a few elements, the color palette
includes almost equal amounts of tones, and the painting technique is reduced to equal amounts of
precisely calculated gestures. Yet, as if to compensate for the purposeful simplicity of the process,
the artist is using an abundance of the paint pushing the image far beyond, or above, the flatness of
the surface. Additionally, through persistent use of burlap’s woven texture as the support, the artist

emphasizes the organic feel of the work while keeping the elements within the rudimentary sphere.
Both painting and shaping his sitters, Lerma’s combination of voluminous lumps of paint laid on thick
threaded-surface creates a scale illusion as all the elements suggest small-scale work while reality claims
otherwise.

With such understanding of his work and impressed by the scale in which these pieces are actually
constructed, we were happy to be able to chat with Lerma and learn a bit more about his practice, his
tools and materials, his background, influences, and references he is using in his work.

Sasha Bogojev: How or why did your subjects get reduced to slabs of paint?

Jose Lerma: I enjoy the contradiction of having an excess of materials and an economy of brush marks.
It is challenging to create a moving portrait with only seven or ten strokes. For that reason, there is a lot
of preparatory work that has to go into these paintings.

What does the process or preparation look like?

I start with a sketch where I work out all the colors and compositional elements in advance. A lot of
details are edited out at this stage. What emerges from this rigorous process has to look straightforward
like a small oil study might feel, with its surface build-up and unevenness, but larger than life. Part of the
desire behind these works is to bring the intimacy of a study and present it on a public scale.

That goal is certainly achieved in my opinion. And what sorts of tools and materials do you use to
achieve that?

I mix the paint in buckets and apply it with commercial brooms and modified brushes. It is thick, heavy,
and begins to form a skin in less than thirty minutes. Once I start to paint, it has to be done fast and in
one shot. It’s not an endlessly malleable substance like oil or versatile like acrylics. You have to plan and
make every brushstroke count because while the quantity of material is excessive, the style demands
that it looks effortless.

How difficult was it to develop your practice to be able to paint in such a manner?

 As a student, out of financial necessity, I began adding various commercial thickeners to paint. I used
medium, gels, marble dust, and hardware store materials. These also gave the paint a rubbery matte
finish similar to play-doh, which most viewers find disarming. I still use the same formulas, but now I use
high-quality pigments. I have been using this mixture for two decades with no significant issues, and
even when it has limitations, it has a very distinctive finish which gives my work its feel. At times, the
paint is so sculptural that it decides the subjects and style, telling what to paint and how to paint it.

Do you see your practice as painting or sculpting?

I mostly think like a painter. It is the basis of my work. Even working within an expanded language
like installation or sculpture, I tend to compose pictorially. I started as a painter who didn’t believe in
painting, so I did a lot of Post studio work and painting. I don’t feel that way anymore.

Was there a certain source of inspiration behind this particular body of work and what are some of your
major influences?

This recent series was influenced by a visit I made to a museum more than ten years ago. I was looking
at a very busy Jean Léon Gérôme painting and noticed the sketch-like handling of the tiny insignificant

background people. I thought that abbreviated style would make exciting large paintings. So I began
to paint larger-scaled works in the manner of small pieces. I also enjoyed the social implications of
painting in the style of peripheral characters and thought that this idea had legs.

My painting influences are Martin Kippenberger, Sean Landers, Jonathan Lasker, Julian Schnabel,
Bram Bogart, Giorgio Morandi, David Reed, Laura Owens, Alice Neel, Robert Colescott, Diego
Velasquez, Piero Della Francesca, and many others. Two of my teachers, TL Solien and Michelle
Grabner were also immensely influential on my practice.

What type of reference images are you working from or how do you choose your subjects?

I used paintings from the European Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago for many years as a
reference. Before that, I used images of relatively unknown historical figures, mainly when traveling
and working on site. Recently, I moved back to Puerto Rico with my wife. I decided then to paint
random people from the neighborhood or just from my head. It has been very liberating to move
away from historical references. Now the images just come to me, and I can live with that.

July 2021

Jonathan Edelhuber and José Lerma:
Contemporary Art History
By Channel to Channel Staff

With our show Contemporary Art History coming to a close next weekend, we asked a few reflective
questions to the artists, Jonathan Edelhuber and José Lerma.

Jonathan Edelhuber (b.1984) an Arkansas native, earned a B.F.A. with an emphasis on Graphic Design
from Harding University. He has exhibited in Los Angeles, London, and Nashville, Tennessee where
he currently lives and runs his practice. Working primarily in oil and acrylic, Edelhuber’s paintings,
drawings, and sculptures meld elements of the modernist motifs of Picasso and Matisse filtered
through a pop sensibility borrowed from comics and cartoons. Often incorporating stylized text, and
occasionally using non-traditional supports (quilts, for example), Edelhuber explores the interaction
of fine art and design. Edelhuber democratically adorns his canvases and objects with his iconic
visual style, all within a spirit that equally values Bauhaus and Daniel Clowes.

José Lerma was born in Spain and grew up in Puerto Rico. He earned an MFA from the University
of Wisconsin Madison and BA from Tulane University, and attended the CORE Residency Program,
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, and Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, ME. He lives
and works in Chicago, IL, and San Juan, Puerto Rico. His work has been in solo exhibitions at the
Kemper Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; and Museo
de Arte Contemporáneo de San Juan, Puerto Rico, among others. His work has been written about
extensively in the press, including in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Artforum.

Channel to Channel: Jonathan, I know that most of your other work is different from the book stack
paintings and sculptures that you made for this show. What made you start painting book stacks?

Jonathan Edelhuber: I’ve always loved books. I remember doing chores as a kid to earn money to buy
this volume of tiny art books at our local book store in Arkansas. The books were really little...like 3x3”
square and they were on the old masters. I was obsessed with them and still have them today! I guess
that was the beginning. I was around 5 or 6. The paintings came about because I wanted to find a way
to paint a still life and art history just seemed like a good place to start. I had books all around me and
I’m a bit obsessed with contemporary art as well, so I threw some of that in.

CTC: Do you feel as though your background in Graphic Design has informed these works?

Jonathan: I’m sure it has. Back in school we had so many years of color theory, art history, drawing
composition, etc., and all of that is tucked away. I rely more on intuition when painting because that
feels right, but all that I’ve learned in school is a good foundation. Probably dealing with type and color
and art historical figures is pulling from my education, but it’s not a conscious thing.

CTC: Are all of the books that you paint real, published books or are they more representational?

Jonathan: Great question! Some are. Some are not. I give myself a lot of freedom there. Some books
might be real, but I’ll change the color to fit what I’m painting. Color is a big deal to me. More so than
the artist I’m putting on the book. The artist is important, but color comes first. On occasion I’ll leave
a book spine just a solid color. Some perfect-bound books are like that and it’s nice to have a little
breather every once in a while with just a strip of color representing a book. It all depends on the
composition. It’s funny, we live in an age where we’re all connected. Instagram is huge and you have all
these people floating around out there that you would never have access to. I just made a sculpture with
Jerry Saltz’s newest book in the stack. It’s fun to post stuff and tag people just to see what their reaction
is. Doesn’t matter if they love it or hate it. It’s still fun!

CTC: José, on that same note, can you tell me a little bit about the people that you painted in your
portrait series for Contemporary Art History? Are they real or imagined portraits?

José Lerma: For years I have been painting significant but relatively unknown historical characters. I was
constantly traveling and teaching, so naturally, museums became a major source of inspiration. Recently
I moved back to Puerto Rico. We bought a house near the beach, and the place gave me a much-
needed distance from my compulsion to do historically-inspired work.

This series is mostly imagined. However, some of the pieces are loosely based on people from my
surroundings.

CTC: Jonathan, how did you curate your book groupings and toppers for these pieces? Which comes
first, the book stack or the painting on top?

Jonathan: I’m constantly looking at art. Consuming art books and looking at galleries in person and
online. It’s a constant thing and the idea for the top image is the first thing that comes. Then I’ll create
the stack under it. I lay out the books according to how I feel the stack should relate to the object above
compositionally. Then I’ll go in with color. The names come last. I read a lot about art and all sorts of
things inform the selection of artists on the books. It’s kind of like a stream of thought. Like, if I have a
Basquiat Venus as the sculptural image on top of the stack, I might add a Cy Twombly book under it
since there’s a connection there. Then I might think of Robert Rauchenberg since he and Cy were friends
and from there add a Brice Marden since he was his assistant...then de Kooning and so on. A lot of art
history.

CTC: Can you name some of the artists or books that have inspired you the most?

Jonathan: I would say those little books of the old masters I got around age 5 have stuck with me and
might be my biggest inspiration. Not necessarily the coolest or best books, but a solid beginning. I
remember one summer back in my freshman year of college I picked up a painting magazine and there
was an article with several pages on Robert Rauchenberg. I remember seeing his combines and just
being blown away. I wouldn’t say I’m his biggest fan by any stretch and I don’t make work anything like
his, but seeing that created a fire in me that just made me want to make stuff and look at stuff! Another
artist who did the same thing for me was Andre Butzer. I got a book back around 2003 and it had some
of his work in it. I was blown away! I still have that book and still follow his work. It never gets old!

CTC: The rest of my questions are really for both of you. If you could work within a past art historical
movement, which would it be?

Jonathan: Definitely the AbEx movement and the movements that trickled out of it. I love reading
biographies on those guys too! That era has had a big influence on the way I see things. And I don’t
know if this is a good thing or not, but I use their work almost as a golden rule when it comes to art.

José: Late Baroque, Cubist and 80s Neo-Expressionist. However, if I could pick an era, it would be New
York 1975-85. Although, I am pretty happy in the present.

CTC: Which artist of the past would you most like to meet?

Jonathan: I’d love to meet Cy Twombly. There’s no doubt I love his work, but I think I’d like him as a

person. He seems to have had real priorities. And he seems to have put more of an emphasis on doing
his work and being with his family ( which also brings to mind Roy Lichtenstein...another trail of thought
that would be good for a bookstack :). I’m personally very uncomfortable in any sort of spotlight so I
feel like we’d get along. We could talk about books, and art and antiques. I would also like to know more
about his past...growing up here in the U.S. and about his life in the South. That’s always so interesting to
me. His life in Italy vs. his life in Virginia.

José: Velasquez, Picasso, Kippenberger, Rubens, Picabia, Frans Hals, Schwitters, Warhol. There are other
artists whose work I love, but they were probably pretty dull people.

CTC: Can you both talk a little bit about what you like about each other’s work? Do you feel like your
work plays well together?

José: I was familiar with Jonathan’s skull paintings, which are incredibly beautiful. I had not seen his
book/pedestal paintings and sculptures. I think they are fabulous. They encapsulate the complexity
of a full hypothetical exhibition in a single work. I also appreciate how the meaning can be direct and
also elusive. For instance, the wrist of the study for the Guernica broken sword leads directly to Tony
Shafrazi’s name. In another piece, the arrow from “Barque de Naïades et Faune Blessé” goes straight
through Tracy Emin’s “The Memory of Your Touch” and finally to Matisse’s “Cut-Outs” This can be a work
of poetic castration and deflated masculinity, but it is also eminently approachable and not pretentious.
The works of art I like the most can be enjoyed by an art historian and a child. I think both our works fit
into this category.

CTC: How do you both see your work evolving in the future?

Jonathan: There are always new things to explore. Paths lead to other paths and I think you need to
explore them all...or at least I want to. I have several bodies of work going at the moment and sometimes
they all seem so different (to me), but if you laid them out in a lines you could see the paths and know
the evolution. I’m just excited to paint and excited to explore more!

José: My work has evolved quite a bit in the past decade. I’m looking forward to a couple of static years.
I am now working on a series of large abstract “portraits”. They are made with an obscene amount of
paint and material and only five to ten brushstrokes. I will be showing them in Los Angeles next month.
My interest in creating large, multi-layered installations has been waning. These were primarily made
in museums or large exhibition spaces and were physically draining. So I am happy to be moving away
from that.

March 2021

The Chicago Artist Taking A Whimsical
Look At Art History
By Mikki Brammer

José Lerma has a sense of humor. His paintings and drawings—be they renditions of historical figures
or interpretations of The Last Supper—embody a cartoonish, tongue-in-cheek aesthetic, in spite of
the pious originals that inspire them. “Often the content of what interests me is either very dry, or
maybe sad or tragic,” he says. “So I try to give it a very happy, approachable, friendly aesthetic. The
idea is that you could be a child and enjoy my works, but also as an adult for completely different
reasons.”

Much of that whimsy comes from candy-like colors of the thick, bubblegum-esque paint he uses.
Though it’s one of his signatures, the technique—which mixes pigments with construction materials
and store-bought binders—was born out of necessity. “I started doing it when I was a student
because it was cost-effective,” he admits. “But it also has the added benefit of being more connected
to real life and to materials that exist all around us.”

Applying the paint in broad strokes using brooms and wallpaper brushes, Lerma meddles with
perspective. “The idea is to enlarge the gesture as much as possible so that the work is not just big,
but a small work made big, so that you feel smaller by extension and it puts you in a childlike state of
mind.”

While his approach is lighthearted, the work is a broader examination of Latin representation in the art
world. Lerma has created a series of what he calls “re-paintings” of Hispanic subjects in the European
and American wings of the Art Institute of Chicago. “My goal was to speak of the lack of proportional
representation for the Latin experience and sensibility in the American museum,” he explains.

Lerma’s new work-in-progress addresses the same concept. Creating doodles of the Art Institute’s
European paintings on cocktail napkins, he photographs the napkins and will eventually digitally
collage them into a much larger piece. “I have done all the European paintings in the west wing,” he
says. “My goal is to finish all European paintings from the Renaissance to the impressionists.” Lerma
will stack the pieces next to each other, following the curatorial logic of the museum. “The overall
feeling of condensing and collapsing the images’ space is claustrophobic and optically charged,” he
says. “It’s a caricature of a museum experience.”

March 2016

Freewheeling: Josh Reames and José Lerma Collaborate
By Daniel Gerwin

The collaborative paintings of Josh Reames and Jose Lerma are a pas de deux in draftsmanship:
Lerma’s freewheeling, skinny line cavorts with Reames’s softer, rounded marks and carefully taped
off volumes. The two artists here join forces for the first time, having spent all of January working in
situ at the Luis De Jesus gallery, a habitual approach for Lerma but a first for Reames. They first met
at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Lerma was Reames’s adviser), and have since become
friends.

The front room holds two enormous paintings on facing walls, He Hath Founded It Upon the Seas
I and II, both depicting fantastical assemblies of pirates, colonialists, or figures that amalgamate
the two. The figures appear in a tropical setting referencing the Cayman Islands, notorious as a tax
shelter and invoked in the first painting by images of a lion, three starfish, a turtle, and a pineapple, all
found on the islands’ official crest (as is the paintings’ title) and in the second by inclusion of Ugland
House, the administrative center for the territory. Ranging in color from jet blacks to faint grays and a
few neutral hues, the scenes are composed with energetic goofiness. Lerma’s multi-eyed caricatures
jostle in tight clusters amidst the chaos of Reames’ cannonballs, beer bottles, googly eyes, cigarettes,
and blocky exclamation marks hovering illusionistically above the canvas surface.

The subject of the paintings begs the political question: given their status as luxury goods affordable
only to the one percent, are these gigantic paintings capable of critiquing those who might utilize the
Cayman Islands for financial advantage? In the memorable phrasing of Clement Greenberg, Reames
and Lerma are tied to these oligarchs “by an umbilical cord of gold.” To their credit, the artists

acknowledge their enmeshment, having populated the paintings with denizens of the Los Angeles
art world and not spared themselves (the artists have stuck their own heads on pikes, and the gallery
owner’s too). Everything is shot through with silliness: a man’s thigh doubles as an enormous penis, a
cannonball sports a face, goofy sea monsters allude to the drug trade, and an enormous leg strides
through the center of the second canvas, meant to suggest Monty Python. This last reference clarifies
the work as comedic satire, a tongue-in-cheek commentary on the world in which Reames and Lerma
make their livings. Faced with a system whose corruption they recognize but in which they are deeply
implicated, the artists turn to the absurd. The Monty Python leg speaks also to the improvisation they
used to arrive at these paintings (they began with a palm tree painted by Reames, to which Lerma
reacted, Reames replied, and so on).

Monty Python is not the only forebear here: in an echo of Philip Guston’s The Line (1978), a hand
descends from the heavens in the middle of the first painting, but where Guston’s god-like hand drew a
line on the earth, Reames/Lerma’s hand extends a finger to touch the pineapple symbol in benediction.
In the second piece, the central leg makes me think of Guston’s San Clemente (1975) in which the
disgraced former President Nixon stands on the beach suffering from phlebitis, his foot and calf swollen
to horrific proportion.

The Reames/Lerma collaboration shares Guston’s commitment to social commentary but lacks his
depth of feeling, but I don’t think they were after that anyway. These are devil-may-care paintings
showcasing Lerma’s frenetic energy and Reames’s loony playfulness, with a dollop of political
consciousness mixed in. Ultimately, it is the visual pyrotechnics that reward attentive viewing. Such
excitements are lacking in the gallery’s inner room, in which the artists hung a rotating gallery door
made to look as though the glass is cracked and battered by stray bullets. The room is lit only by
spotlights shining through bottles of Windex serving as blue gels, alluding to gentrification as a
bourgeois cleansing performed by artists and galleries taking over low rent neighborhoods. The piece
feels overly concept-driven and humorless compared to the front room.

The project room in the back is a final grace note, not to be missed. Two paintings by Reames and
one by Lerma offer a look at each artist’s syntax when left to his own devices, a handy key if you’re
having trouble deciphering who made what in the front. Lerma’s contribution, Doubting Thomas,
is breathtaking. Jesus is the central figure, with his disciples tightly clustered around him to fill the
rectangle. The painting is a jumble of bodies claustrophobically pressed together, made from black and
white stencil-patterned torsos with flowing hair framing fleshy, eyeless faces with bulbous glowing pink
noses and mouths. A finger pokes Jesus’s wound in the painting’s center. The blindness is striking given
Lerma’s penchant for heads with anywhere from five to dozens of eyes. The painting is electric in its
urgent opposition of belief and skepticism.

October 2015

Jose Lerma’s Neon Gestures
By Inside/Within Staff

Lit with bright, white light from the floor to ceiling window at the front of his studio, José’s work is
cast in an ethereal glow, bright pinks, purples, and blues converging to form the faces of bourgeois
bankers and 17th century royalty. To create these large paintings José scales up his materials, using
brooms to produce thick, sculptural paint strokes. His neon palette and tendency towards light-
activated works serves as a distraction to his works’ content, forcing the audience to test their
concentration while being bombarded with blinking lights.

I\W: What are the portrait subjects you are focusing on in your newest paintings?

JL: For the past three years I have been working on shows where I just make the paintings on-site
and use whatever materials I can find. I haven’t done anything like studio work in a while, so recently
I have been trying to get back into studio mode. I wanted to try going back to the paintings I was
making in 2008 that I kind of abandoned. I have painted Charles II and his father recently as subjects.
With every succeeding generation I paint the chins get bigger and more cartoonish. In order for them
to retain power they had to inbreed, and as you inbreed your chin gets bigger and the possibilities
for breeding again become fewer and fewer until you make the whole thing disappear—a kind of an
implosion seen through genetics. I would like to display all of these portraits as a family, but right
now I am just painting individual portraits instead of making work for a show based on a singular
concept which is how I have typically operated. Usually I do some research, find some historical facts,
and then start collecting materials that somehow deal with the subjects in terms of surfaces and
pigments. The materials adapt themselves to the theme.

Why are you drawn to this vibrant neon palette that seems to permeate all of your paintings?

I’m not sure. I was doing a lot of pastel work from 2004-2007, and all the paintings were very very
light. The whole idea was that they would have a very slow read for the audience. The colors would be
adjusted slightly so the light would be bouncing from side to side. These paintings now only have three
or four colors, so the work is able to be read really fast. The interpretation now is about the sculptural
aspect of the brush and the thickness of the paint. By this point the color choices have become an
affectation. I did do some shows that had very bright colors that would also interact with lights. That
was important in that particular context because a lot of the subject matter I was doing was centered
around banking or conquest—subjects that were not necessarily boring, but were very serious. I wanted
the audience to feel themselves being distracted. That condition is something I am interested in—having
a very dramatic distraction happening at the same time you are being given something serious. Your
sort of forget what you are looking at and continue to stare at the painting’s colors.

Is that distractive element the reason behind several of your installations’ use of strobes, black lights
and flash sensitive materials?

Some are, and others come from stories. The reflective curtains come from a story where my father set
some curtains on fire when I was a kid and it was traumatic, so that light thing was a very important
theme in my work. In my show at the MCA I used the curtains because each piece was a reference to
one of the donors of the museum. Everything was as portrait of the plaque that was already in the
room. The person whose plaque was in that particular room happened to have been an ophthalmologist
and specialized in laser surgery for cataracts. I wanted to reference that by placing a very optical effect
in the work.

A lot of your work pulls both from a collected history and your own personal history, why do you like to
combine both of these subjects?

The history thing is just something I am interested in, at first I was just making work about stories
from my life and then I hit a wall. There are only so many interesting things that you can say about

yourself. I gravitated towards history because I was reading biographies anyway and watching a lot
of documentaries. I thought why don’t I just use this, I do this anyway. It seemed like an easy decision.
Then I knew I needed to blend the elements and try to create a third thing— a third meaning. Place
honest reaction and honest interest together and use it as a machine to create aesthetics. It is not as
mechanical as that, but it is a great thing to go back to when you are stuck. By now some of the stories
reveal themselves in later forms. At some point it just becomes ingrained into my aesthetic. It solidifies
as a form I use, but it has a very honest beginning. The carpets for example come from really specific
stories.

What specific stories, and how did you begin to incorporate them into your installations?

The story is from my childhood. Both my parents were working one day and I decided to take some
paint and use it on all of the furniture as well as the carpet. I thought I was doing this great thing and
they would be really impressed. However when they came back home I said, ‘Ta da!’ and revealed it
to them my mom was obviously extremely angry. But I had no idea! I remembered that story and was
trying to think what I could do with it. In 2007 I was using that retroreflective fabric and I had a show
in Berlin where I was going to show some paintings I had made with it. When I got there however there
was a German guy that had done some retroreflective paintings in the gallery next door! It was only a
month until my show, but I knew I had to come up with something else. That fabric is cool but it is too
seductive. It is too easy. I was looking at carpets in Berlin and they have all of these great colors. Then
the tourist thing kicks in. If you are in Home Depot, everything is beige, if you are in Berlin everything is
orange and bright blue. In the U.S. we don’t have carpets like that. I spent a month there making acrylic
paintings on their carpets. That set off a whole body of work.

What prompted you to start incorporating sound into your work through your keyboard paintings?

I try to push the paintings’ materially constantly. I wanted the paintings to have their own soundtracks
without having some sort of device making music on its own. I wanted the painting to produce the
music. I played keyboards as a kid and was in a lot of electronic bands and collected keyboards. One of
my first shows that was in a gallery called 7/3 Split in Chicago. I had this habit of arriving with no work,
even then, just making it on the spot and improvising. I did something with lipstick that I found, dirt,
and I was lent a keyboard for the show as well. I taped three notes to do a D minor chord referencing
Spinal Tap’s joke of using the saddest chord in the world. I thought that was a funny thing because the
whole show was about humiliating myself, punishing myself. I made things that just looked pathetic. The
keyboard leaned against the wall with headphones attached so you could kind of hear it as you walked
by. Later on I thought I should use that again and steal from myself. Now the idea is that they usually go
under rectangular paintings and the viewer moves and scans the painting and walks from one side to
the other which is playing a different note. You can sense the change as you are scanning the painting
which I got from the use of panning in documentaries.

How do you manipulate scale in your work?

There is a lot of my work that has to do with how you encounter things as a child, and a lot of the
scale is pushed up. To make these paintings I use materials that are also enlarged like brooms instead
of brushes, and the paint is enlarged as well. The idea for me is to make big paintings that feel quite
small. Everything that I make feels like a doodle that went out of control or a small painting that just got
enlarged. To me that influences your sense of scale in relation to the work, or else it would just be a big
painting.

March 2014

José Lerma: Gloriosa Superba
By Stephanie Cristello

Conspiracy is often faithfully followed by the term theory. It is a type of narrative that lends itself to
the unknowable; founded on conjecture and speculation, on estimations of the factual that cannot be
proven or disproven, existing forever in a state of both reality and fiction. Though, as a word that so
often attaches itself to the indeterminable definition of theory, conspiracy is a term that perpetually
surrenders its factual possibilities. The potential for truth is always eliminated at the sight of the word.
But what if the fiction implied was not in opposition to truth? What if the conspiracy immediately
admitted its own invention? In his current exhibition, Gloriosa Superba at Kavi Gupta, the conspiracy
José Lerma depicts does not theorize, but imagines. There is a distinction in the texture, the affect,
of these two systems; one travels toward truth from rumor, the other travels from truth into the
unknown. Almost out of necessity, the collection of paintings on view confound the probability of
falsehood onto the narrative at hand, embracing the fictive and deceptive nature within the task of
representing lives of historical figures – specifically the infamous legacy of the wealth distribution in
the Rothschild family.

Like much of Lerma’s past work, this new collection of paintings hinge on their decorative and
ornamental elements; the image is often buried by its depiction, reduced to formal elements of color,
pattern, and gesture. That being said, a representational likeness to the subject is never Lerma’s goal.
“The family has historically been careful to disclose as little as possible, so while they do convey the

physical traits of their subjects, there is no psychology,” says Lerma. “[The portraits] are instruments
of exchange, of physical absorption and reflection…they are impersonal.” The stylistic distance
between the subject itself and the way it is painted is meant to disarm, to enchant, and eventually,
to question the significance of the figures supposedly portrayed. The paintings, much like the
subjects themselves, rely on the conceit that the deception within the descriptive liberties of the
paint application is also part of their allure. Six paintings total hang on the walls of Kavi Gupta’s
Washington location; each features the silhouette of a portrait painted on mirror, done in a singular
color palette that coordinates with the color wheel – indigo, violet, blue, green, yellow, etc., moving
clockwise – met with various gestural marks of lines, scribbles, and hash tags on the layer nearest to
the surface in brash, neon brushwork.

We are told this collection of paintings represents the patriarchal members of the Rothschild
family – Amschel, Salomon, Nathan, Carl, James, and Mayer Amschel – who were famed for their
international banking dynasty, founded on what would now be considered insider trading. The
title of the exhibition is also a reference to the namesake of the plant species named after the
Rothschilds, the Gloriosa Superba Rothschilinda, a genus of vine that climbs by attaching itself
the flower that preceded it, similarly mimicking the distribution of money within the family. The
main conceit of the installation cites two genres and trajectories on view – first, of the portrait, and
second, of the still life or landscape painting tradition. Using the plant as a central metaphor, the
installation is meant to elicit a type of contamination, or one could just as easily say germination,
of the palette within the portraits by infecting the surface of the mirror with a different portion of
the color wheel installed in the rectangular space. Yet, the inconsistencies are also scrawled on the
surfaces of the paintings themselves – they contaminate their own color, just as they spread their
own hues onto others’ reflections; a treatment of color and form that is at once unwanted and
welcomed – like ceremonial weeds.

An overtly cartooned depiction of a column resides on a pillar near the center rear of the gallery space.
In a walkthrough of the space, Lerma recalls the alleged rumor that led to a large portion of the family’s
wealth. Positioned by the father, each of the sons took up posts around the world, globally connected
with a number of Rothschild family agents to report the progress of opposing powers. One of the sons,
Nathan, was known for standing against the “Rothschild Pillar” releasing “silent, motionless, implacable
cunning” at the London Stock Exchange. During the Battle of Waterloo, he made his speculations on
the victor to win a fortune – posturing that Napoleon had won. He had in fact been crushed; Waterloo
was lost. Stocks sold like wildfire. Seconds before the real news broke, Nathan bought a giant parcel for
almost nothing, amassing an incredible amount of valuable stocks for cheap, immediately inflated by the
actual victory. Years of savings and wealth were eliminated by the engineered panic, won instead by the
family. The metaphor of everything at stake begins to spill over into Lerma’s line between representation
and abstraction – using rumor as a method to picture fighting the war from both sides, but in painting.
In Lerma’s words, the rumors that surround the Rothschilds “are morality tales after all, and the
distraction is there for a reason.”

An attitude of amusement abounds in the exhibition. This funhouse aesthetic, of mirrors, neon, black
light, and illusionistic space, interacts with the viewer as much as it interacts with itself. However,
the false representations and artificial reflections always betray their own illusion. In a purposefully
pretentious titled installation, A Critical Analysis of Central Banks and Fractional-Reserve Banking
from the Austrian School Perspective, a 10% slice of the built-out space is mirrored on either side,
seamlessly appearing as a kaleidoscopic fountain in reproductions. The memorialization Lerma awards
to this family, just as he represents painting’s trajectory from representation to formlessness, is instead
remembered in the artificial real, a monument of deception and ruse you can look at and imagine, but
never experience in the round.

“The work is about financiers and pie charts – with such un-sexy subject matter, I can be forgiven
for embracing spectacle in some form,” says Lerma. “The fact that, as an audience, what we end up
embracing are the illusionistic effects is indicative of how we got to this situation, in the first place.”

October 2013

 José Lerma
 By Kyle MacMillan

As has been evident in a string of successful exhibitions in Europe and the U.S., José Lerma—
who splits his time between New York and Chicago, where he teaches at the School of the Art
Institute—likes to work on a big scale, arranging his nontraditional paintings and objects in room-size
installations with a conceptualist, site-specific thrust. For this exhibition, Kristin Korolowicz, a curator
at the MCA Chicago, has tried to highlight the multiple directions in Lerma’s work, but here she was
perhaps overambitious. The artist, who clearly needs a generous area to display his work effectively,
had just two small galleries and some subsidiary spaces at his disposal, and the show looks a little
constricted as a result.

Wittily facing each other from small mezzanines on opposite sides of the museum’s lobby, Marjorie
Looks at Marianne and Marianne Looks at Marjorie (both 2013) animate what are usually lounge
areas. Representing the two donors for whom the spaces were named, the 8-foot-tall, three-
dimensional heads are made of the heavy colored paper used for backdrops in photo studios, loosely
folded and shaped. They have a lighthearted, caricatural look, but they lack the playful dynamism of
some of Lerma’s earlier pieces in this vein, such as a group of oversize busts of historical figures (he
calls them puppets) that he made in 2012 in collaboration with Héctor Madera, another Spanish-born
artist who lives in the U.S.

Like much of Lerma’s work, the busts of Marjorie Susman and Marianne Deson Herstein address the
function of portraiture, past and present, and explore issues of power and display by examining the
interrelationships among artists, institutions, viewers and patrons. He continues these investigations

in a room containing three paintings, including Portrait of Norman and John (2013), depicting the
founders of two banks that merged in the 1980s as BMO Harris Bank—one of the largest banks in the
Midwest, and the sponsor of a series of exhibitions of which this show is a part. Lerma pairs the men’s
vaguely cubist faces in acrylic paint on a 27-by-24-foot rug that spills across the gallery floor onto an
adjacent walkway. This is one of Lerma’s well-honed gambits: creating oversize drawings and paintings
that he places flat on the floor, Carl Andre-style. But this solitary work does not exert the same visual
impact as the vibrant collision of images in his more expansive patchwork displays.

Dominating the rest of the gallery is Parterre (2013), an 18-by-10-foot canvas resting on two electric
keyboards; the pressure creates an unending drone. Korolowicz states in an essay accompanying
the show that this arrangement is intended as a metaphor for the weight of painting’s history on
contemporary art. Lerma often uses, as here, a fine-point airbrush technique, with an effect almost
like ballpoint pen. Taken from The Exhibition at the Salon du Louvre, an 18th-century engraving by the
Italian artist Pietro Antonio Martini, the painting’s cartoony, loosely drawn faces are packed together in
patternlike rows, forming a strikingly realized composition.

A second gallery is ringed on three sides by a curtain made of a shimmery silver fabric that reflects and
distorts colored light cast onto it from two suspended projectors. Nearby are another leaning keyboard
painting and two smaller wall pieces. Lerma conceived this room display, titled “Midissage,” as both a
kind of surround painting and an installation, but I found its conceptual aims perplexing. While Lerma
clearly has much to say, he is not seen at his best in his first MCA Chicago show.

July 2013

José Lerma’s Patron Portraits Come To MCA Chicago
By Priscilla Frank

Back in the golden age of civic portraiture, a powerful painting didn’t just capture a subject’s likeness,
but communicated status, power and wealth. Instead of aiming for the truest resemblance, artists
created idealized versions heavy on the theatrics.

Enter José Lerma, a Spanish-born, Chicago-dwelling artist who is determined to bring the civic
portrait back with a vengeance. His newest exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in
Chicago, “BMO Harris Bank Chicago Works,” is rooted in civic portraiture’s grand tradition but is
anything but traditional, featuring materials such as commercial carpet, electric keyboards, and
military parachutes.

For his MCA exhibition, Lerma took inspiration from the names of the museum donors that dwelled
on plaques around the space, creating a gallery-sized depiction of the founders and first presidents
of the merger between the Bank of Montréal and N. W. Harris & Co.

Lerma’s work exude a vigorous playfulness with just a hint of something sour, resembling children’s
cartoons that begin to decompose. Holland Cotter compared Lerma’s earlier work to the “freakish”
depictions of Philip Guston and Carroll Dunham, though the artist lacks the stomach-turning
grotesqueness, instead leaving the most subtle unsavory aftertaste amid the sweetness.

The exhibition runs until December 3, 2013 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

May 2012

José Lerma
By Manuel Alvarez Lezama

Born in Seville, Spain, but raised in Puerto Rico, José Lerma is one of the most prestigious and
relevant artists of his generation. It is interesting that, although a distinguished professor for many
years already at the Art Institute of Chicago—also a Visiting Scholar in several other higher learning
institutions in the US and Puerto Rico—Lerma has achieved the success he now enjoys because of
two existential decisions he made. Already in his second year as a law student at the University of
Wisconsin at Madison, Lerma decides to abandon the legal career and refocus his passion for the
visual arts. What began in a small elementary Puerto Rican school that emphasized the visual arts—
where he studied with two of the most important artists in Puerto Rico, Chemi Rosado-Seijo, on the
one hand, and Guillermo Calzadilla from the collective Allora & Calzadilla on the other—soon became
Lerma’s present and future. The other decision occurred ten years ago after he had solidified his
position as a prominent conceptual artist when he made the very difficult but necessary decision of
abandoning (or using it in combination with other elements) conceptual art to embrace painting with
a daring and controversial gaze.

We must remember that this occurred when conceptual art and other new media were already
established and had begun to “displace” painting as the central creative approach among young
emerging artists. Nonetheless, in that phase of his career, Lerma chooses to experiment with
extremely daring avant-garde techniques. He utilized many of the resources implemented by the
abstract artists from the New York School, and eventually combines them with elements of figuration,
in order to convey an emotional life that is not solely his but one that is shared by many of the people
around him: namely, according to the artist, the desperation and pathos we experience. Within his

visual discourse, we can observe the generous amounts of paint he uses, the manner in which he
renders it, the expression of his strokes, and the shapes: imperfect essences that draw us closer to
a certain kind of reality. What is Lerma trying to capture and share with the public? Is it sadness,
tragedy, or the human pathos—a society full of injustices, falls, fake values—that does not allow us to
fully celebrate life?

From the start, Lerma’s painting—the events and sceneries in it, his family, those close to him,
every day—present a rereading and a conversation centered on art in general after Impressionism,
Picasso, Duchamp, Figurative Expressionism, Warhol, and New Figuration. Both in Puerto Rico and
the US, Lerma exerted great influence in some prominent disciples of his who were impacted by his
discourse, among these: Fernando Pintado, Roberto Márquez, and JUNI Figueroa.

This exhibition entitled Jibaro Jizz at the attractive Roberto Paradise Gallery is Lerma’s first solo
exhibition in Puerto Rico alongside Tito Rivira. Here Lerma, who is also a musician, names the
exhibition after an album by Pedro Guzmán entitled Jibaro Jazz. Every work is mounted on an
artifact that produces a specific type of music. The works on their own can be interpreted as harshly
critical and ludic; a “trivialization” of an often pathetic, degenerate, and absurd past, represented
by characters of questionable reputation or, as Lerma puts it: “truly pathetic.” His referents are
characters like Charles II of Spain (The Hexed), Charles II of England, John Locke, Samuel Bernard,
etc. They are constructed like enormous doodles created with that which would appear to be a blue
ballpoint pen. These images were actually rendered with regulated airbrushes. Then Lerma covers
them—through a highly sensual aesthetic process that is also very cold—with translucent fabrics
taken from used parachutes—a visual effect that forces us to indulge in some kind of intellectual/
historic/sexual voyeurism of sorts, in order to find out exactly what is going on in this enormous, epic,
and very well-conceived doodle with small and large “anecdotes.” It appears that Lerma is paying
homage to Steve Jobs, who once told a class of graduating students at Stanford University: “Stay
hungry, stay foolish.”

Lerma challenges the public to discover and learn the presences—faces and figures—of important
figures afflicted by complex, sad, hated evil, and yes, pathetic personal lives. To do so, the
artist studies to the last detail each of his “models.” In this singular exhibition we observe them
accompanied by music, we see them naked or almost naked; the way we arrive into this world and
leave it.

January 2011

José Lerma
By Matthew Israel

Relegated to this gallery’s smaller rear room, José Lerma’s latest exhibition, “I am sorry I am Perry,”
would have benefited from the larger main space. His show is brimming with ideas, which deserve the
additional real estate.

The show’s title is sourced from a Spanish joke that reflects on the limits of language. Lerma
conceived of the included paintings as portraits of bankers produced by a bureaucrat using office
tools that might be at hand, such as Bic pens and pink highlighters. Keyboards playing ambient
music act as supports for some of the paintings—the result is something like Chris Ofili’s dung balls
replaced with Korgs. (The music resembles the kind characteristically used on the sound tracks of art
documentaries, which might well be a wry joke on the artist’s part.)

The inspiration for many of these works seems to be Philip Guston’s late figuration; the pieces play
off this source material without feeling pretentious. In looking at John Law, 2010 (possibly based on
Alexis Simon Belle’s depiction of the Scottish economist, which hangs in London’s National Portrait
Gallery), viewers could lose themselves tracing the intricate faux-Bic swirls (created with a doctored
airbrush) of the figure’s wig; these whorls threaten to take over the whole painting. One is then
entirely sideswiped by the seeming reverse of this formal approach: wide pressings of paint in wasabi
greens, light grays, and slightly creamy whites. A hanging reflective curtain feels disconnected from
the other works until one notices how it continually changes the light in the room, splits the viewer’s
shadow into three, and extends the experimentation further.

January 2011

José Lerma
By Ester Ippolito & Monica Salazar

Jose Lerma’s work relies on a compendium of mediums, references, and elements that combine his
personal history and his extensive academic accolades to his awareness of social history. The artist
originally migrated from Spain to Puerto Rico and now lives between Chicago and Brooklyn, and has
multiple degrees in law and art. It is his ability to combine and collapse facets of history that is best
presented in his works now on view in ‘I am sorry. I am Perry’ at Andrea Rosen.

In his paintings, Lerma makes a trend of using images of Baroque style portraits of historical, famous
French Bankers from the 18th Century, which are signified by the wigged portraits in some his studio
pieces. He started drawing the characters over and over after shooting photographs of them while
in law school. The pieces for this exhibition are monumental, somewhat decadent in liberal use of
strokes, doodles and highlights of paint. The pastel colors add a lightness to the pieces that works
well with the harshness of the profiles of these historically brutal, old bankers.

Lerma places his large works on electronic keyboards as a way of combining previous elements of his
oeuvre and collapsing the work together. In a way, it is as if the paintings become active participants
in the art. However, beyond this, there is no added meaning to the pianos, a fact stressed with the
daily changing of the musical tones the pianos play.