Artist to Watch: Che Lovelace’s Vibrant New Paintings Are a Love Letter to His Native Trinidad
A solo exhibition at Nicola Vassell Gallery, on view through July 25, explores the poignant relationship between nature and society in his home country
Throughout most of his career, Che Lovelace stayed as far away as possible from painting coconuts and palm fronds—Caribbean flora felt too obvious for a Trinidadian artist. But in recent years, the viridescent glow of home has become inspiration for Lovelace’s rich, tropical language, themed around local rituals, interiors, and figures. “With maturity, you realize that this is where you’re from and these shapes are beautiful,” he says of the shift. “How can I see the vegetation around me with new eyes? There are certain types of plants like heliconias and breadfruit trees, which are generally robust and have very strongly shaped leaves that work well to bring into paintings as visual elements.”
Utilizing a quadrant technique, Lovelace paints four panels before assembling them into a single, semiabstract tableau. The method allows him to try “different things without committing to one,” he explains. Through July 25, a series of his large, spellbinding works are on view at Nicola Vassell Gallery in New York, including Bush Night Poem (2025), completed over the past ten years. “That one is extreme,” he says with a laugh. “But at least half of my paintings are long-durational paintings. It gives me time to explore stylistic traits.”
The show’s title, “Where the I Settles,” is a double entendre. “Some people in the Caribbean refer to the self as the eye,” explains Lovelace, who also won national titles as a champion surfer. “This exhibition is where I share the most about who I am. I can say, ‘Let me present a landscape, let me present a still life, let me present a person, and find a way to tie them together.’”
The location of his studio, on a former U.S. Army base on the western outskirts of Port of Spain, Trinidad, comes through in the works. “You have the remnants of the architecture that is very standard and military, but it’s in a part of the island with a lot of nature around,” he says. “I think I have a very generous gaze because I live in a place that is very stimulating—if not overstimulating—with Trinidad’s vistas, but also the people, the history, and the cultural expressions.”
A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2025 Summer Issue in the section “Artists to Watch.” Subscribe to the magazine.