Rafael Trelles, Caliban XII, 2026. Oil on linen, 50.8 x 76.2 cm.
Shakespeare gave Caliban very little. He is the island’s only native inhabitant, a figure Prospero names a “savage,” enslaves with magic, and keeps in line through control. For four centuries, the story has been told from the magician’s side.
Rafael Trelles has decided to turn it around. This autumn, October Gallery presents Caliban, the Puerto Rican artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. In a new series of paintings, Trelles takes one of literature’s most contested characters and re-imagines him as a symbol of indigenous resistance to colonial domination. Prospero no longer commands the narrative. Caliban does, and he does so with dignity and resilience.
Trelles is known for conjuring magico-mythical realms from overlapping layers of paint, playing with fantastical effects of light and shade. In Caliban, those worlds become the setting for a quiet act of restoration. His Caliban is a creature entirely at home in his dreamlike native state, living in harmony with his environment. His intuitive understanding of the island’s fauna and flora speaks to an inner determination to win back the freedoms taken from his occupied home.
Prospero, by contrast, is the interloper. In Trelles’ hands, he stands for the Western habit of looking at the world as something to be sorted, ranked, and controlled through colonial systems. The paintings reject that view. Nature here is neither a passive backdrop nor a resource waiting to be exploited. It is an active space of symbiosis and interconnection, alive and answering back.
The series draws on the writings of the influential Cuban intellectual Roberto Fernández Retamar, who proposed that “Caliban” works as an anagram of “cannibal,” a word itself linked etymologically to Caribe, the name for all the indigenous inhabitants of the Caribbean island chain. For Trelles, that thread of language and history is personal. “In this precise sense,” he says, “I am Caliban.”
By bringing hidden links between literary figures and historical realities to the surface, he connects the Caribbean’s colonial past to the present: to migration, to racism, to cultural displacement. The paintings also ask a gentler, more unsettling question: how might the stories we tell ourselves quietly shape the worlds we live in?
Trelles was born in 1957 in Santurce, Puerto Rico, and lives and works in San Juan. He began studying painting at eleven under the Spanish painter Julio Yort, and in 1980 undertook postgraduate studies at the University of Mexico, Mexico City. In 1985, he moved to the Canary Islands, where he began to explore alchemy, mysticism and magic. Out of that exploration came his signature technique: naturalistic drawings of flora and fauna combined in ways that carry overtones of ethereal significance. His paintings are suffused with hints of hidden insight and awareness. He first showed with October Gallery in 2018, in the exhibition Portal, with a series called Flora that invited viewers into a naturalist trance. His work has since been exhibited internationally, including at Elite Fine Arts Gallery in Florida and the Queens Museum of Art in New York. Rafael Trelles: Caliban runs from 26 November 2026 to 16 January 2027 at October Gallery.
For further information on the show, visit the gallery website.
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Rafael Trelles, Caliban XII, 2026. Oil on linen, 50.8 x 76.2 cm./ Rafael Trelles, Caliban X, 2026, Oil on linen, 121.92 x 91.44 cm.
Images provided courtesy of the artist and gallery
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