ABOUT THE ARTIST
Patrick McGrath Muñiz was born in New York and raised in Puerto Rico, the son of a Puerto Rican mother and an Irish-American father. He paints under both names because both are in the work: the Caribbean mythic imagination of the island he was raised on, and the view from the empire and mainland he was born into and still lives in.
He earned a BFA from the School of Fine Arts in San Juan in 2003 and an MFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2006, where he found his mature voice as a painter working in the Spanish Baroque and retablo tradition. His paintings integrate the iconographic language of Spanish Colonial devotional art and turn it on the present, reflecting on the colonial roots of our contemporary consumer culture and the neo-colonial doctrines that shape how we relate to nature, history, spirituality, and ourselves.
In 2017, Hurricane Maria destroyed his home and studio in Puerto Rico along with most of his early work. Among the few items he salvaged was a tarot deck he had kept since 1993. That deck became the seed of his current practice: a body of drawings, paintings, altarpieces, and cards that read world history and personal memory through an archetypal lens.
McGrath Muñiz is the author of the Tarot Neocolonial de las Américas, published by U.S. Games, and regularly engages audiences through his YouTube channel, "Art & Archetypes," where he explores themes of art, symbolism, and cultural critique. He is represented by Evoke Contemporary in Santa Fe and Heidi Vaughan Fine Art in Houston. Patrick now lives in Texas with his wife Blanca and their son, Francis.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I paint on canvas and retablo panels, the small devotional altarpieces of Spanish colonial America, using the techniques of the old masters who first carried them across the ocean. Those images were never neutral. They were built to teach a conquered people what to worship. I borrow that machinery and aim it at the present, because I am less interested in arguing about history than in asking a quieter question: what do we worship now, and how different is it from what we worshipped before?
The old gods and the new ones share the same frame. The cross and the screen, the colonial saint and the pagan idol, the Madonna and the corporate logo. I have built a pantheon out of traditions that were meant to erase one another and instead only painted over each other, never quite gone. A few figures return no matter what else changes: the hermit monk, the migrant, the Madonna above a flood, a crowded boat on dangerous waters, the animals gathered around them. They are archetypes more than characters, the same few souls I keep meeting in world history and in my own life, which I have come to see as one cyclical story rather than two.
I came to this through loss. When a storm took the house and studio where most of my early work and memories were kept, one of the few things I carried out was a Tarot deck I had owned since I was a teenager. The work I have made since grew from that deck outward: drawings, paintings, altarpieces, and cards that read the present through allegory and old symbol. I am drawn to tarot, myth, and the language of the sacred, and at the same time I hold all of it with a grain of salt. Believer and skeptic at once. The paintings live in that gap, and so do I.
I keep painting by hand in an age of AI and algorithms, not out of nostalgia but because I think contemplation is a kind of resistance now. A painting may not solve anything, but it can restore attention, patience, and the first-hand sensorial experiences the machines are training out of us. That is the one thing I am sure of. I see art as a creative attempt to recover some of our fading memories and as an antidote to our intolerable collective amnesia and the superfluous, distracted consumer media that keeps us disconnected from the natural world and our human psyche. Ultimately, I make art as a way to know myself and connect my own story with the larger story of humanity.
