CARLOS BETANCOURT

Carlos Betancourt is a Miami-based artist of Puerto Rican and Cuban heritage whose work in performance, installation, photography, and video explores issues of memory and personal experience while also inhabiting issues of nature and the environment and matters of beauty, identity, and communication. By means of re-examination, he recycles and reinterprets fragments of the past and delivers it in a recontextualized form.

Influenced by his own memories, Betancourt believes that art is informed by one’s experience, and not necessarily the other way around.

ABOUT THE WORK:

Betancourt’s photographs, which have been made over more than 20 years from his studio in Miami with his long-term lover and creative partner Alberto Latorre, are explicit in their adoration. Portrait of a Dream depicts the artist and Latorre during what seems is a morning coffee ritual turned religious reliquary: Alberto appears bound and bloodied but is in fact covered by carnations perhaps in reference to the arrows and wounds of Saint Sebastian. A tragic image, Alberto becomes both an idol to the erotic and a playful saint-figure for the aesthetics of a queer Caribbean Miami.

Sunday Afternoon in El Yunque communicates a similarly quiet eroticism, evoking Classical sculpture: Latorre, adorned with tropical flowers and plants, poses in front of a green mountain, emerging god-like from the earth, the sun landing gently on his nude torso.