CARLOS ROLÓN/DZINE

Carlos Rolón/Dzine attended Columbia College Chicago with a concentration in painting and drawing. In the past several years, Rolón has been recognized for his elaborately crafted paintings, ornate sculptures and works that come out of Kustom Kulture. His studio practice investigates pop culture, craft, ritual, beauty, spirituality, and identity and its relationship to art history, subculture, appropriation and the institution. The work often addresses his own biography in relationship to his Puerto Rican heritage and U.S. upbringing. The carefully crafted, hybrid works are playfully situated between the contradictory worlds of conspicuous consumption and urban artifact. The work is at once melancholic, excessive and exuberant, poised somewhere between celebration and regret. Rolón illuminates how the masculine can become delicate and the how the baroque can be minimal.