Over the past four decades, Mexican artist Roberto Márquez (b. 1959) has constructed a singular painting language that resists categorization. Relatively unknown until this past spring in New York, where the artist has resided since 1990, Márquez’s practice ruptures the bounds between Realism and Surrealism in paintings that depict enigmatic figures within stark, heightened environments, eroding any distinctions between the two categories. Built up with layer upon layer of impastoed oil, his surfaces evoke the textures of façades, foliage, streets, and earth. Drawing on Renaissance narrative, pre-Columbian iconography, Mexican Muralism, and European Modernism, Márquez transfigures his sources into paintings that are pointedly affecting and deliberately ambiguous. Personal memory intermingles with shared myth, the past and the present merge, and fleeting perceptions cohere into contours of a larger radiating whole. The centerpiece of Márquez’s Art Basel Miami Beach presentation is “The Season in Insomnia,” a suite of paintings that stage the four seasons in distinct scenes. The works follow a cycle of change, loss, and renewal. For Márquez, the seasons in these paintings mark time while also signifying natural and otherworldly transformation that is both personal and universal. Figures bathe, rest, and supplicate within his compositions. Charged symbolic imagery shapes his figures within these intensified and atmospheric landscapes. Existing between sleep and waking life, his paintings behave like interstitial zones that dissolve any separation between dream and reality. Márquez borrows narrative strategies from Renaissance religious painting and the flat, sequential storytelling of Mexican retablos and Medieval art. A constellation of Classical references surface throughout, from Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I (in Fall), to Masolino da Panicale’s baptismal scene (in Spring). Raised in Guadalajara, where images of saints and martyrs surrounded him as a child, Márquez speaks of his experiences of these devotional pictures as formative. The intense feelings they carried and conveyed linger in his memory, memories that take shape through the metaphoric elements Márquez weaves into his compositions. After moving to New York in 1990, he became fascinated by the cadence of the seasons, a marker of time he had not known in Guadalajara with its uniform temperatures all year round (the city is sometimes called la ciudad de la eterna primavera). Márquez’s imagery of uncanny weather patterns, drought and desolation, and sudden fecundity might also suggest dynamics of climate change, and narratives of migration and political upheaval. Yet his economical compositions produce open-ended arcs, with formal elements that lace alienation and escape with humor and respite. Roberto Márquez (born 1959, Mexico City, Mexico) is a Mexican painter who lives in New York. 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 (solo); Tucson Museum of Art (solo); Museo de las Artes, Guadalajara (solo); and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. Originally from Guadalajara, Márquez moved to the United States in 1985, settling in Phoenix for five years before relocating to the New York metropolitan area in 1990. Márquez first solo exhibition in New York was staged at Paul Soto Gallery in Spring 2025. His works are part of notable public collections, including Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Phoenix Art Museum; Tucson Art Museum; Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Mexico; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, MARCO, Monterrey; Museo de las Artes, Guadalajara; and the Pizzuti Collection in Columbus, Ohio.

ABOUT ARTISTS : Roberto Márquez

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