Artist Statement
In the end, it’s all the same: man’s search for eternal spiritual bliss, or for answers to questions related to money, health, and love. They are all the same, regardless of one’s ethnic background. Likewise, almost all men desire intervention from the gods to grant them favors. My photographs are a lifelong quest for those answers, and, second, of my prayers for the gods’ intervention to grant me peace. It is a continuation of my previous incursions into popular religious beliefs around the world: Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Venezuela, Brazil, Peru, Martinique, Cambodia, Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan, China and Thailand. The themes of my photographs and video art no longer relate solely to Puerto Rico. Today, I am photographing the same cultural themes as always, but in other scenarios and places. And by photographing these themes around the world, I hope to reach a world-spanning audience. Process Statement
I digitally cut out the original Buddha or Inca image, to separate it from its background location, and then pasted it onto a new background, which I created from photographs of walls worn by time. The altered backgrounds in the series are reminiscent of images created by twenty-first-century map-making technology such as infrared satellite imagery and sonar maps. In these photographs one can easily visualize images of islands, continents, and land masses surrounded by deep blue oceans of imagination. Others look like surrealistic skies or fiery infernos. It’s all left to the viewer’s imagination. I try to engage the viewer to “see” inside the images. H. Méndez Caratini’s high-energy neon-colored twenty-first-century depictions of the multi-faceted Buddha portraits may be described physically as large format (48" X 36") museum-grade digital photographs giclée printed on fine quality art rag paper.

 

 

Héctor Méndez Caratini, photographer and video artist, was born in 1949 in San Juan, Puerto Rico. During the past four decades he has dedicated his life to documenting and promoting the cultural identity of his nation and other developing countries. His work has been featured in over one hundred exhibitions in museums and galleries in the United States, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean.

His photographs are in the permanent collection of a number of prestigious museums, among them The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, The Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the International Center of Photography in New York City, the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona, the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico in San Juan, Puerto Rico, the Museo de Arte de Ponce and the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Méndez Caratini has received numerous distinctions during his professional career, including First Honorable Mention for the Casa de las Américas Prize in Photography in 1981 in Havana, Cuba; the Leopold Godowsky Color Photography Award from the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University in 1990; the Kodachrome Film Award of Excellence given by Eastman Kodak in 1991 in Rochester, NY; First Prize at the QuickTime Film Festival Award (Macintosh), 1992 in San Francisco; the Premio Guanín (S.M.E.) in 1997 in San Juan, Puerto Rico; and the First Prize for Photography in the Armando “Mandín” Rodríguez photography contest, awarded by the Senate of Puerto Rico in 2001 in San Juan.

He lives and works in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

 

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