SC Gallery proudly presents “Empty spaces/Many faces”, Roberto Rodriguez’s (Avilés 1981) first solo exhibition in the gallery.
16 February – 3o April 2024.
For further information, please contact: comunicacion@scgallery.es
In the 1970’s, in California, around the same time that John Baldessari burned all his work produced to date with the cry of “I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art”, a surfer named Frank Nasworthy developed a polyurethane wheel for skateboards that improved grip. This would give birth to modern skateboarding and, unbeknownst to him, to a whole unstoppable “subculture” that has imbricated itself in the social, artistic and economic fabric.
When Roberto Rodríguez Redondo (Avilés, Spain, 1981) focused his attention on the world of skateboarding and surf culture for his first works, he confronted the vital experience of a movement that opposed a dominant reality and the longing of his vocation as an artist in the development of works linked to contemporary painting, graphics and urban art.
From his academic background, Roberto turned the Do It Yourself spirit into a journey in search of his own identity as an artist, forming a personal alphabet that oscillates between craftsmanship and mass culture.
In “EMPTY_SPACES_MANY_FACES”, his first solo exhibition at SC Gallery, the artist focuses on the pictorial, abandoning the traditional frame of the stretcher to approach a sculptural three-dimensionality. If we take a concept like Murakami’s superflat, Roberto is at the exact opposite of this idea: instead of flat works, we are facing volumetric stratified pieces that can be described as a hybrid between painting and sculpture.
While his previous works were characterized by drawings of naturalistic inspiration, this exhibition runs through a figurative iconography that seeks its roots in an ancestral and anthropological culture. These pieces, in which he uses wood and industrial paint, are the result of a very processual construction where the image is laminated, achieving bas-reliefs of different thicknesses that are characterized by glossy finishes and that naturally allow the whole image to be formed.
Aaron Rose, co-director of Beautiful Losers, affirmed that “all artists are souvenirs in museums”. However, in this critique he also highlighted art’s capacity to assimilate popular culture as a constant magnet, integrating a whole iconography of low culture into contemporary society.
This idea that fetishizes the objects is reinforced in Roberto’s pieces with a carefully designed physical construction that materializes in a more intimate phase of the study, where the handcrafted and manual becomes defining characteristics of the work. The topography of the panels, the gaps between the parts and the treatment of the color make their attractive appearance flow into the white cube in a natural and light way. At the same time, we find ourselves before objects that refer us to an unknown world that is not under the rule of the logos, a place that is not subject to the speed of information and where the unprecedented makes its way.
Therefore, the pieces could be seen almost as the dystopian representation of gods of an ancestral culture, an aesthetics of emotions to create objects of desire and worship, pieces that refer to a lost nature of a contemporary tribalism where objects become icons of forgotten civilizations.
With this body of work, the author recognizes that art pieces can occupy multiple domains: the aesthetic and the transcendent, the commodified and the priceless, and emphasizes that even within a cultural context shaped by image, consumption and artificial intelligences, basic emotions such as love, friendship, loneliness and alienation remain constant in the artist’s gaze.
F.M.M
