Raelis Vasquez does not recall being drawn to art prior to his family’s emigration from the Dominican Republic to the United States in 2002. “I don’t think I would be an artist if we hadn’t immigrated,” he told Artsy during a recent video interview. “There’s no reason to be creative unless you have a problem to solve. Immigrating gave me a problem to solve.”
In his current solo show “As We Were”—on view at Sakhile&Me in Frankfurt, Germany—Vasquez tends to the matter of memory as it enables and embattles translation. The exhibition, which features several figurative paintings of his family prior to emigration, transgresses temporal boundaries by situating his family’s past at the center of his contemporary work. For the paintings, Vasquez studied old family photographs—moments captured and safekept to combat the fleeting nature of time. In his masterful artistic recollections of his own life and history in the Americas as an Afro-Dominican artist, Vasquez is earnest in his efforts to represent the Afro-Latinx experience while prizing clarity and realism.