This painting is a visual echo of a rhythm I couldn’t get out of my head, one of Pachyman’s tracks looping in the studio while I worked. His sound blends dub minimalism with digital precision, all anchored in Puerto Rican roots and diasporic memory. I wanted to respond to that musically structured space by building my own: a grid of colorful pulses that move like beats, delays, or echoes in a sound system.
The dots feel like code, but also like drums, every mark a hit, a rest, a drop. There’s a kind of sequencing at play, but it’s not rigid. It drifts. The arrangement suggests a visual synth pattern, or maybe an interface left behind by some analog-digital hybrid. There’s joy in the repetition, but also something meditative, almost like the rhythm becomes a structure to think within.
I was also thinking about translation. How do you carry the heat and humidity of a Caribbean sound system into a cool, matte grid of color on a panel? This was my attempt. It’s not a transcription, it’s more like a dub version of the original energy. A remix in paint.
8 x 10 in. | Acrylic on wood panel
Ángel Rafael Vázquez-Concepción 