THESPESIA GRANDIFLORA
Nino Mier Gallery is pleased to present THESPESIA GRANDIFLORA, José Lerma’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery.
September 9 – October 17, 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.
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.
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.