Roberto Márquez

Paul Soto Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition curated by Donald Ryan of paintings by Roberto Márquez (b. 1959, Mexico City, lives and works in Weehawken, New Jersey). This is the artist’s first exhibition in New York City and his first with the gallery. The exhibition features self- portraits set in New York City, spanning from 1989 to the present. Both the genre and setting have been central to Márquez’s practice since he moved to the New York metropolitan area in 1990, where he continues to live and work.

Like the young flâneur, Marquez was captivated by the intricate tapestry of contradictory symbols and sensations that define the modern city when he arrived in New York City from Guadalajara via Phoenix, Arizona. In these paintings, he explores the visual and felt dimensions of urban subjectivity, focusing on how the body moves through space. Through self-portraiture, he reflects the ways individuals occupy the liminal gaps that exist between the urban and the pastoral, the past and the present, the temporal and the fleeting.

Márquez’s imagination is capacious. Literature and poetry inform his artistic process, and he evokes the immersive and emotional experience of reading by employing affective rather than descriptive strategies. Within the frame of a single painting, one might glean aspects of and references to music, Indigenous American myth, Mexican muralism, and the history of European painting. Eroding the bounds between reality and imagination, his scenes feel both familiar and elusive, as if drawn from a corrupted memory or a forgotten dream.

In the three-panel painting Devil’s Sonata (1999), a young man stands knee-deep in waves, holding a conch shell to his ear. One can only assume he is trying to hear Giuseppe Tartini’s 18th-century violin sonata of the same name. A New York City travel guide lies washed up on the beach in the foreground, alongside a fish skeleton, a starfish, and other pieces of sea debris. Once noticed, this incidental detail lingers in memory, grounding the scene in a specific place. The motif captures the imagination, revealing something both personal and universal, allowing memories to take shape in the present through the act of observation.

With his thick impasto and realist style, Márquez examines the overwhelming spectacle of the city. Rather than rendering it as abstract, he conceptualizes urban space with intense clarity. His scenes feel undeniably real, yet their existence, meaning, and origin remain elusive and open- ended. The boundary between inner and outer worlds shift, sometimes blurring, sometimes just out of reach. Glass office buildings reflect the external world back at the artist, distorting his sense of orientation. The city becomes a place where he can be everyone or no one at the same time, at once alienating and liberating.

—Donald Ryan

Roberto Márquez (b. 1959, Mexico City, Mexico) is a Mexican-American painter. He studied sculpture at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas de la Universidad de Guadalajara, poetry at the Elías Nandino Literary Workshop, and architecture at the Instituto Tecnológico de Estudios Superiores de Occidente (ITESO) before ultimately dedicating himself to painting.

Since 1982, Márquez's work has been exhibited internationally, with shows in the United States, Mexico, Australia, Europe, South America, and South Korea. His paintings have been featured in prominent institutions, including the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, MARCO; Tucson Museum of Art; Museo de las Artes, Guadalajara; and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.. His works are also part of notable public collections including Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes in Mexico, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Arizona State University Art Museum, and the Pizzuti Collection in Columbus, Ohio.

Originally from Guadalajara, Márquez moved to the United States in 1985, settling in Phoenix, Arizona for five years before relocating to the New York metropolitan area in 1990. He currently lives and works in Weehawken, New Jersey.