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Shareon Bhare Portrait
WHEREVER YOU GO, THERE YOU ARE
Shareon “Bhare” Blenman
Caribbean diaspora, United States, b. 1998, Queens, New York
Shareon “Bhare” Blenman is a first-generation Barbadian American artist born in Queens, New York, and currently based in Charlotte, North Carolina. The son of immigrants who carried with them the culture, values, and spiritual worldview of the Caribbean, he grew up navigating two worlds simultaneously — the collective spirit of island ancestry and the restless individualism of the American experience. This dual inheritance lives quietly but persistently in everything he makes, woven into the way he sees, the way he listens, and the way he chooses what is worth painting. Among these layered inheritances, the spiritual traditions of African origin hold a particular presence — not as doctrine, but as ancestral memory, as a way of reading the world that was carried across the Atlantic and has never fully left.
His first artistic practice was not painting but cooking. A graduate of Johnson & Wales University with a degree in Culinary Arts, Bhare approached the kitchen as a space of care, creativity, and deep attention — a place where the trust others place in you demands your very best effort, even in the simplest gesture. But cooking taught him something more enduring than technique: a methodology. Unexpected combinations of ingredients produce new flavours. Experimentation without a fixed outcome is not a risk but a practice. When language failed him as a means of expressing what he felt, painting absorbed this same logic. He mixes media, textures, and references with a playful freedom that mirrors the intuitive experimentation of a cook who trusts his instincts more than his recipes. There is no fixed formula — only curiosity, layering, and the willingness to discover what a thing wants to become. Guided by this spirit, Bhare stands at the forefront of his generation: a Gen Z artist whose practice is defined not by a single medium but by the relentless pursuit of crafting something true, no matter the form it takes.
He describes himself as a “selfish painter” — not in the pejorative sense, but because his work is an act of radical self-attention. His assertive, folksy canvases are visual journals populated by a cast of characters drawn from everyday life, each piece a record of what it means to live fully as a young African American man with Caribbean roots. The subject matter is resolutely ordinary: a broken vase, a family meal, a leaky ceiling, the weight of a quiet afternoon. For Bhare, these are not small things. They are the full range of human experience — the moments that everyone recognises, regardless of background, and
that most art overlooks in favour of the extraordinary. His commitment to the everyday is, in this sense, both a curatorial choice and a quiet act of resistance: I matter, and so do the simple things that shaped me.
A self-taught painter, Bhare has exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Toronto, and Philadelphia, among other cities. His work is held in numerous private collections nationwide as well as commercial spaces, with pieces commanding upwards of high five figures. Wherever You Go, There You Are marks his first exhibition in Portugal.
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Wherever You Go, There You Are | Exhibition
