About — Juan Alberto Negroni

Juan Alberto Negroni is a Puerto Rican visual artist based in Dallas TX whose work explores the intersections of memory, place, and postcolonial identity through a multidisciplinary approach grounded in drawing and painting. Born in Bayamón, Puerto Rico, Negroni’s practice often contemplates the emotional residue of landscape and architecture, infusing abstraction with personal and historical narrative.

Negroni holds an MFA in Studio Art from Southern Methodist University (2017), an MA in Art History/Museum Studies from Caribbean University (2008), and a BFA in Printmaking from the Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Diseño in San Juan (2003).

His work has been exhibited extensively across the United States, Europe, and Latin America. Recent solo exhibitions include A comet’s fainted tail at Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts (2025), Revaluation of Origin at Galleri Urbane in Dallas (2024), and Pacificaribbean at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art (2021). He has also shown at institutions such as Le Consortium Museum (FR), Museo de Arte de Bayamón (PR), Anchorage Museum (AK), and the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña (PR).

Negroni has participated in international residencies, including Mission Street AIR in New Mexico (2022) and the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art in Dijon, France (2017). His work is part of notable public and private collections, including the Le Consortium Museum (FR), Meadows Museum of Art (TX), and Casa Silvana Collection of Afro-Puerto Rican Art (PR).

In addition to his studio practice, Negroni has contributed writings to exhibition catalogs and art journals, reflecting a deep engagement with contemporary Caribbean art discourse. His work is represented by Galleri Urbane in Dallas, Galerie Rompone in Cologne and Les Îlles in Amsterdam, NL.

Memory Garden

In childhood one views the world as a thing of wonder and beauty. We cherish significant visual experiences from that period and return to them with melancholy and fascination. Observation leads to understanding. The childhood gaze is a straightforward reading of the visual field, almost unadulterated. Eyes fall on those things that require detailed scrutiny because we do not yet understand them. Juan Negroni’s current paintings reach back to his childhood memories of the times he spent in his parents’ garden; a time of intense visual inquiry. As young children develop a sense of their world, they begin to connect sight and emotion, comprehending how the visual can lead to pleasure. Negroni’s attempt to relive those moments in painting offers us this common, shared experience of early visual discovery. It shifts us in time to that moment of early recognition.

Negroni’s small canvases are magnetic for the emotions they trigger. He does not paint scenes of himself at work in that garden. He has instead chosen to evoke his sensory response to that moment in that environment. His abstractions are recognizably plants but also specific memories made universal experiences.

The small size of Negroni’s canvases suggests intimacy. But their emotional scale is considerably larger, stretching feelings into an open public sphere. Emotion becomes an open and somewhat borderless space, suggestive of the outdoors. But these are not landscapes in any conventional sense. Painted in portrait mode, there is no division of pictorial space into earth and sky. No horizon. Still the feeling is terrestrial, the space full of earthy light. Colors mark the time of year. Spring’s succulent greens are absent, so too are Autumn’s softer ambers and browns. Present are the fuller, more fleshy tones of red and blue that point to times of ripe sustenance. Yellow tones radiate the temperature of a lazy afternoon.

Everything seems within reach. Patterns of vertical and horizontal lines in foreground or background suggest an enclosure, and Negroni’s tight layers of brush marks, stains, and washes, compact the space and draws the viewer in. One feels contentment in this environment. There is no angst, no hunger, only a spiritual peace.

Juan Negroni’s ultimate concern is viewers’ emotional engagement through beauty. Negroni’s pleasure in memory transmutes to the viewer herself. Like some poets, he combines abstract signs or ciphers that conjure ideas, trigger emotions, and suspend time. To dramatise a childhood discovery that is as particular as it is individual, is a great painterly achievement.