RUBÉN RODRIGO. Zona estratégica de redundancia

The exhibition Strategic Zone of Redundance is Rubén Rodrigo’s (Salamanca, 1980) third solo exhibition at the Fernando Pradilla Gallery.

In this opportunity, the artist has worked with the architectonical space of the gallery rooms: its lintels, the door openings, its nooks, and the height of its ceilings, to devise not only the spatial arrangement of the works, but also the form of the stretchers; in this fashion, and if it were a site-specific work, Rubén encourages a play between the rigidity of architecture, and the flexibility and voluptuosity of the painting.

Six new large-size canvases are being presented, all of which showcase Rodrigo’s continuing research on “soak painting” techniques, using increasingly thinner layers of oil painting which accrete into the form and color of his paintings.

As art critic Carlos Delgado Mayordomo lucidly explains: “The work of Rubén Rodrigo is a direct heir of the modernist tradition, understood as a process of depuration over that which is not substantial to the pictoric medium (that is, mimicry or the literary). [...] Rodrigo pays heed to the achievements which were devalued: for instance, the symbolic intention, the scenic presence, the registering of time, or the transcendental dimension of the image.”

This latest exhibition redounds upon these aspects, both symbolic as, properly speaking, pictoric—surface, color, brush stroke, and the surface which, in its interaction with the architecture, provide an aesthetic experience which bears witness to the artistic maturity which Rodrigo has of late mastered.

From Carlos Delgado Mayordomo’s text, To Be Able To Say (About Rubén Rodrigo’s Paintings), published in the catalog of his previous exhibition in our gallery back in 2021, we extract the following paragraphs:

Aesthetic Decisions

In his most recent projects, abstract appropriation allows him to rehearse an interpretative exercise upon the various chapters of tradition, from a humble position, open to a constant discovery. Thus, from El Greco he is interested in that which constitutes his extravagant rarity, and which has been the source of numerous historical and critical evaluations, particularly since the 1908 polemic monograph by Cossío. Among his modern affinities, American abstract expressionism and other fellow poetics are unavoidable references for him, as well as the (neo)figurative painting of Francis Bacon.

We shall return to these re-readings and appropriations. But before it is necessary to point out that Rubén Rodrigo does not dodge the particularly problematic crossroads of contemporary aesthetic commitment: first and foremost, his constant work with a medium that still bears the accusation of becoming an “overused language.” His commitment to painting entails, besides his affirmatively involving himself in the debate regarding its current survival, a reckoning with one of the terrors of the avant-garde: the autonomy of art turned into mere ornamentation. A crisis regarding his avant-garde position that is replicated with an expanded painting toward the installation or the ambient.

The aesthetic decisions of Rubén Rodrigo seek new fields of pictoric imaginary which are always located within the format-painting. His discourse does not slide toward hybridation or conceptual excess, the seduction of the abject or the rhetoric of the gesture. On the contrary, upon the canvas he traces the opening of a clean, diluted stain, with a deceivingly uniform aspect, upon which he develops a pondering of its possibilities: spatial conflicts, negation of the image origin, tensions between order and instability and, above all else, the sensitive animation of color.

The condition of his paintings is borne out of a formal auto-critique, which leads him to explore time and again the same process of overlapping veiling and layers. This traditional technique, based on transparencies and planes, is the same that he makes use in Photoshop to compose and decompose the image. Deleuze, in his lecture on Francis Bacon, noted the already paradoxical condition of abstract painting which, even if it articulates itself from the analogic, “implies operations of homogenisation, binarisations, that are constitutive to digital code.” The pictoric imagination of Rubén Rodrigo can’t be untied from this reflection upon the act of seeing and the nature of images in the digital age as well as the hypertrophia of the gaze. And, as a response, he offers a work of great visual density, reflexive, committed to the pictoric aesthetic experience and set against the tendency to an instant consumption of the image. A painting that rejects the wholeness and transparency of meanings, highlighting instead the complexities of perception: from a distance, his canvasses are coursed by monochrome veils which unfold, wrap and unwrap; in the proximity, intersections of color they produce subtle contrasts and unforeseen rhythms. Control, chance, dialogue and games of scale: potentially limitless keys in their combination.

The abstract finding

From his first exhibitions, which took place around the early 2000’s, Rubén Rodrigo has explored different formal and technical options, always searching for an image of his own. He has moreover developed an insightful dialogue with the most recent abstract tendencies, all of them remarkable in their heterogeneity. Arhtur C. Danto tried to limit the kind of impure abstraction to refer to those tendencies which acted, from the 90’s onward, with full freedom and in the margins of the principles of abstract formalism. Demetrio Paparoni suggested the term redefined abstraction to allude, without stylistic specifics, to a set of aesthetics that, far from inventing, wanted to redefine what already existed from a new system of relations. Among the definitions that tried, in general unsuccessfully, to term the abstractions around the turn of the century, perhaps the one that comes closer to Rubén Rodrigo is the one posited by Juan Manuel Bonet, meditative abstraction, which he connected to the poetics of Rothko and Newman, and which articulated themselves as a “lyrical abstraction, based upon a deep reflection on the romantic tradition of the North.”

Beyond the possible cartographies of the group, the gaze of Ruben Rodrigo aims at everything that interests him: the romantic tradition of the North and the aesthetic of the sublime, but also Spanish baroque painting, the contemporary abstract derivations or the findings of the arts and images coming from the Far East. Everything is united by a symbolic path that connects color with the sediments of memory denominated by Jung as the collective unconscious. This is not about, however, establishing a precise relationship between symbol and symbolized, but rather of reactivating the expressive character, semantically wholesome, of color.