“What I paint is one thing that not exists,” Francisco Rodríguez says. “Like how the celebrities we’re are already lifeless—their mild reaches us after they’ve turned to mud.” He describes his apply merely: “I’m portray mud—recollections of locations that not exist.”
Rodríguez’s work hint inside feeling by liminal areas and sensory impressions that resist language: the scent of an orange, adolescent craving, the hint of a spot that survives solely in reminiscence. For him, portray reconnects these lineages not as fastened archives however as residing impressions, constantly reshaped over time.
His reference factors stretch from Japanese Edo-period printmaking to Chinese language horizontal panorama portray and Flemish Renaissance traditions. These visible inheritances inform his flattened compositions and muted palette, which evoke pastoral or dreamlike atmospheres: layers of cool-toned blue and cream punctuated by bursts of major crimson and orange. Up to date figures seem all through in numerous states of relaxation and motion, drifting by home scenes much less as protagonists than as embodiments of the unconscious.
Rodríguez’s solo exhibition at Baert Gallery, Personal Nightmares, extends these themes whereas introducing a darker emotional register formed by present-day anxieties. Throughout this new physique of labor, figures flip to analog gadgets as if reaching for a portal of escape from the relentlessness of latest media cycles. The work grapple with the paradox that the instruments meant to attach us typically go away us feeling extra remoted and divided than ever.
Rodríguez articulates this ambivalence by suspended moments between childhood and maturity, interiority and public life, dependence and autonomy. He’s drawn to adolescence for its openness and emotional volatility, qualities that mirror the broader uncertainty of latest life. His work enable vulnerability and ambiguity to stay translucent.
In No Mercy for Fascism, a teenage lady wears wired headphones and a T-shirt emblazoned with “ZERO,” referencing The Smashing Pumpkins’ 1996 hit and Billy Corgan’s embrace of self-negation as a rebellious refusal of imposed id. This punk sensibility reverberates all through the composition: a poster on the wall depicts a strangled snake alongside the phrase “no mercy for fascism,” whereas a shadowy determine rises behind the lady, pointing in the other way. Collectively, these parts stage a charged stress between retreat and resistance, inside withdrawal and political refusal.
Rodríguez echoes this emotional register by returning to the visible language of his youth, together with hand-drawn Japanese animation, buying and selling playing cards, and comics. Drawing is foundational to his course of, granting so-called “low” aesthetics the identical legitimacy as art-historical traditions. Artists like Aya Takano and Peter Doig function touchstones for his or her graphic linework and character-driven figuration.
For Rodríguez, the non-public is political. Portray turns into a quiet type of resistance by its intentional return to stillness in a second outlined by urgency and oversaturation. “I’m utterly in love with portray,” he says. “Pondering which you can create a picture with simply mud and oil. That to me is a sort of alchemy.” Via his devotion to vulnerability and materials course of, Rodríguez’s apply presents each a meditation on the previous and a distillation of the current.
Different works, comparable to The beast, Energy outage; Septmber eleventh, and Guardians, introduce ominous, shadow-like canine that symbolize looming hazard. For Rodríguez, these figures function each psychologically and formally: they register as manifestations of hysteria whereas additionally asserting themselves as dominant visible forces. Rendered as dense black silhouettes, the canine take in surrounding colour into their void, overtaking the composition and collapsing spatial depth. With their piercing eyes shining by the darkness, they materialize an emotional state into bodily form, making unease palpable.
Personal Nightmares invitations viewers into suspended moments through which reminiscence, adolescence, and interiority unfold slowly, countering a recent tradition that rushes previous reflection. In Rodríguez’s fingers, portray holds the delicate emotional register of previous lives, modern chaos, and the delicate promise of connection threaded by each. –Sigourney Schultz
