José Lerma: Thespesia Grandiflora — José Lerma

Nino Mier Gallery is pleased to present THESPESIA GRANDIFLORA, José Lerma’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition is on view at 62 Crosby street from September 9th to October 17th, 2026.

In this exhibition, the Puerto Rico-based artist explores the island’s 128 year relationship with the United States mainland through portraiture. Lerma’s exhibition consists almost entirely of portraits of Puerto Rican politicians, athletes, and cultural figures. These portraits foreground questions of Puerto Rican identity and representation that are further reflected in the exhibition’s title. THESPESIA GRANDIFLORA is the scientific name for Puerto Rico’s national flower. Colloquially referred to as the flor de maga, the exhibition’s title offers an ironic nod to the current administration’s notorious slogan. In a moment in which Americans celebrate the nation’s 250th anniversary, THESPESIA GRANDIFLORA explores and critically examines the limitations of symbolic and political representation.

THESPESIA GRANDIFLORA comprises over 30 paintings rendered in Lerma’s signature impasto. Lerma applies a thick acrylic mixture onto burlap canvas, using a broom to create broad strokes that pool at the seams, forming magmatic swaths of paint. The topographic quality of these protruding collisions of color appears to emerge with the force of shifting tectonic plates. The apparent spontaneity of Lerma’s gesture is in fact a precise choreographic endeavor that the artist has honed over the past few years; his minimal figures are often rendered in fewer than fifteen brushstrokes.

This transformation of the subject’s visage into simplified forms––a technique Lerma terms “backgrounding”––is inspired by the minimal, sketch-like depiction of peripheral subjects in Old Masters paintings. Lerma enlarges the figures themselves, as well as the scale of the brushstroke and the weave of the canvas, opting to paint on more coarsely woven burlap. This magnification effectively shrinks the viewer, encouraging one to confront the painting beyond the narrative interpretation of a sweeping tableau. The works instead provide the viewer with an opportunity to meditate on the material constituents of the painting itself, and the concentrated mark of the artist’s hand.

Within the context of this exhibition, Lerma’s long-developed approach of making protagonists out of extras becomes a potent inversion of the hierarchical relationship between core and periphery subjects in painting. Lerma’s interest in exploring power dynamics through portraiture is further amplified by his use of color. Portraits of Puerto Rican natives are rendered in whitewashed, muted pastels, with greyish blues and cool-toned pinks flooding the canvas. Through his use of a more subdued, desaturated color palette, Lerma calls attention to the limits of soft power and the selective representation of Puerto Ricans in culture at large.

These works are juxtaposed with what Lerma calls his “immigrant paintings”––highly saturated paintings of mainlanders who migrate to Puerto Rico to enjoy island life, consciously unconscious of Puerto Rican politics and history. Some of the faces in the portraits are drawn from American actors who have played Puerto Ricans in past decades. In Natalie, a figure in profile based on the silhouette of West Side Story’s Natalie Wood, tilts her head upwards, as though basking in the sun. The work features a prismatic display of bright pinks, cobalts, and lilacs that invoke feelings of unadulterated pleasure. Lerma uses chromatic intensity to comment on imbalances of power, with these vivid works contrasting the more anemic, anti-tropical portraits of Puerto Rican figures, who suffer a loss of agency reflected in a loss of pigmentation.

The back room of the gallery features Desde la Cruz, a large-scale work that compresses all the characters found in the liturgical paintings of late 18th-century Puerto Rican master Jose Campeche into a chaotic mass of blue. From this source material, Lerma achieves the immediacy of a frenetic ink doodle through his use of a customized airbrush.

Ultimately, THESPESIA GRANDIFLORA marks a culmination in Lerma’s oeuvre, taking a technique he has refined over the past few years and imbuing it with a greater historical and personal resonance. Here, Lerma’s manipulation of scale, gesture, and color becomes fertile ground for exploring power in politics and culture. By placing Puerto Rican figures alongside the privileged outsiders who have increasingly shaped the cultural and economic landscape of Puerto Rico, Lerma turns his longstanding interest in foregrounding peripheral subjects into a pointed meditation on who is represented and how.

José Lerma (b. 1971, Sevilla, ES; lives and works in San Juan, PR) received his MFA from University of Wisconsin, Madison in 2002. He has had over twenty solo exhibitions at galleries such as Almine Rech in Paris, FR, Nino Mier Gallery in Los Angeles, CA and Brussels, BE, Kavi Gupta in Chicago, Xavier Hufkens in Brussels, BE and Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York, US, and at museums such as the Museo de Arte Puerto Rico, PR, Kemper Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, MI, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, IL. 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. Lerma served as an Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago until from 2009 through 2023.