JONATHAN CARELA b.1991
Is a multidisciplinary artist from the Dominican Republic. His practice explores human behavior and the social structures that shape it through a critical reinterpretation of the Caribbean landscape as a space of tension between the political, the emotional, and the symbolic.Inspired by personal and collective experiences in both urban and rural Caribbean contexts, Carela draws on everyday language, improvisation, irreverence, and humor as formal and poetic tools. Through painting, video, and sculpture, he challenges social imaginaries, questions colonial legacies, and evokes symbolic forms of resistance, while also proposing the possibility of constructing a visual memory from the margins.
Carela received three associate degrees in Altos de Chavón, the school of design, D.R.: Graphic design (2013), Fine Arts (2014), and Author’s cinema (2020). His work has been shown in the Dominican Republic, New York, and Miami.
STATEMENT
I make art that explores identity, joy, rebellion, and everyday life in the social margins of the Caribbean. I create work that represents agency in both urban and rural landscapes.
Working across painting, sculpture, and film, I treat materials as memory agents. Using acrylic as my primary medium in painting, I incorporate sand, charcoal, and construction debris as residues of labor and infrastructure, indexing histories of extraction, precarity, and survival. In sculpture and film, I extend this approach through the use of found materials, reinforcing a material language rooted in accumulation, reuse, and lived environments. Through this material vocabulary, my work collapses distinctions between the symbolic and the physical, highlighting how environments are both constructed and internalized.
Working across painting, sculpture, and film, I treat materials as memory agents. Using acrylic as my primary medium in painting, I incorporate sand, charcoal, and construction debris as residues of labor and infrastructure, indexing histories of extraction, precarity, and survival. In sculpture and film, I extend this approach through the use of found materials, reinforcing a material language rooted in accumulation, reuse, and lived environments. Through this material vocabulary, my work collapses distinctions between the symbolic and the physical, highlighting how environments are both constructed and internalized.