Rafael Vega (1979, Yabucoa, Puerto Rico) lives and works in New York and Puerto Rico. After completing his BS-Industrial Chemistry (2003) and BA-Painting (2007) at theUniversity of Puerto Rico, he received his MFA with a major in Painting and Drawing
from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012.

 In the exhibition Moving Target, Vega continues his pursuit of painting with intervention methods. The work speaks of boundaries, materials, and surface. Vega has constructed a body of work through confrontation with the support structure (plywood) of his paintings breaking through to the space behind the two-dimensional space and engaging the viewer with the physical history of its making.

 Barry Schwabsky, writing in 2013 about Vega’s work, has said, “his willingness to attack the surface of the painting in the most aggressive way,
scratching or carving into it, with bits of the Masonite support sometimes chipping off as a result. One might think of the way Lucio Fontana used to slash his canvases. But the difference in materials and tools—Masonite versus canvas, saw versus knife—creates a
very different effect: Fontana’s gesture was simple, elegant, sexy, whereas the mark left by sawing into Masonite is rough, determined;
it speaks of work more than of pleasure.

“Every work oscillates between two antithetical modes, without ever becoming entirely one or the other. On the one hand, they offer a palpable tactility that emphasizes painting’s physical object-hood, while on the other; they become dematerialized surface
marks that affirm notions of flatness and opticality. For Rafael Vega, the act of painting becomes a discrete zone of tension and a
terse essay about unresolved possibilities.”

He had solo shows at Guided by Invoices Gallery, New York; Walter Otero Contemporary Art, Puerto Rico. Group shows and art fairs include, As Above, So Below, Hannah Beerman and Rafael Vega, curated by Barry Schwabsky, The Arts Center at Duck Creek, East Hampton, NY (2022); Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico (2021), NADA Art Fair (New York, 2018), HIONAS Gallery (2017), El Museo del Barrio (2015), Savannah College of Art and Design (2015), ART LIMA-Feria Internacional de Arte (2014), PINTA-NY (2013), Chaco13: Contemporary Art Fair (2013), and Guided by Invoices Gallery (2013). His work has been featured in The Nation, Vitamin P3: New Perspectives in Painting, ArtNexus, Modern Painters, Arte al Día/International, New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, and New American Paintings.