The late, great painter Arnaldo Roche Rabell, who some authors call "Roche-Rabell," is a gifted storyteller in the exploration of self-identity.

As a Puerto Rican who eventually studied and lived in Chicago, Roche Rabell was conscious of the way in which his paintings created a "third space," a bridge between Caribbean and "Estadounidense," United-Statesian. Like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Roche Rabell worked in a mode akin to hip-hop: his large paintings sweep you off your feet.

Alongside the epic scale and immersive process of his work, Roche Rabell was able to secure a place for his art in the exhibition world, which had excluded Puerto Ricans for political reasons until very recently. Partly because Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, the fact of Puerto Rico's uniqueness, including its influential brand of Afro-indigenous Caribbean culture, may not be understood, or even welcomed, by a U.S. audience. If Puerto Ricans weren't distinctly Puerto Rican, if they were more enamored of the empty promises of cultural, linguistic, and physical assimilation, Roche Rabell's participation, for example, in an "ambitious" 1987 U.S. exhibition entitled The Art of the Fantastic would have been less of an event. Roche Rabell speaks for people who identify with simultaneous indigenous, African and European ancestry: his powerful We Have to Dream in Blue (Tenemos que sonar in azul) shows a dark face with blue eyes, bordered by leaves.

In Puerto Rico, a newspaper headline blares, "Arnaldo Roche is Inspired by the Great European Painters," taking the opportunity to classify Roche Rabell as an "expressionist" in the tradition of Vincent van Gogh. Surely his education in the U.S. brought him into contact with the European Greats, but his intention was never to consciously borrow their ideas, much less to teach other Puerto Ricans about "high" art. On the contrary, Roche Rabell laughs, "I actually produce work like a little baby, not a great teacher" (“Realmente, yo produzco más como un nene chiquito y no como un maestro"). On a practical level, this means that Roche Rabell was able to set aside his intentions and his ego in order to produce his work based on his intuition and instincts, one of many factors linking his work not solely with European modernist art movements, but the syncretic African spiritual practices of the Caribbean, as well. In an interview, Roche Rabell says that he has always felt that his subconscious mind is more connected to the Divine Being than his conscious mind.