PRESENTATION: Dagoberto Rodríguez

Combining architecture, design and sculpture Dagoberto Rodríguez’ work employs humor and irony to comment on core topics in art, politics and society. Watercolor forms a very important part of his creative process, it is a way of collaborating, registering and revising his ideas. Often these reflect a fantasy of a possible conceptual situation.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Galerie Peter Kilchmann Archive

In recent years Dagoberto Rodríguez’ work has been investigating the humanitarian and hostile circumstances brought by armed conflicts in various regions of the world. His work addresses the strategies of power and repression, control and dominance over the social and human body. While investigating these societal tragedies, Rodriguez’s work lays bare the ways in which politics infiltrate space and private life.  In the exhibition, entitled “Solar Storm”, Dagoberto Rodríguez, a former member of the collective Los Carpinteros, revisits certain themes that he has treated before, while weaving a web that brings them together anew. In four chapters, Rodríguez reveals a panorama of political situations from around the world: the sad reality of yet another war in Europe’s doorstep; migrant crises provoked by such conflicts; the desire to flee a hostile world and to take refuge – why not on Mars; and what this ultimate quest means in terms of utopianism. Brought together in an unprecedented ensemble, the new works take the form of video, sculpture, oil painting and watercolor. Visitors are welcomed by a helmet in the window, which belongs to a set of 7 other identical helmets (NIDEC CSC10) presented on a shelf in one of the gallery spaces. These helmets, accessories of warrior cultures, are also associated with police forces. Cast here in sparkling aluminum, aligned in an almost rigid order, they contrast strangely with the anarchic and chaotic conglomerate of objects spilling over onto a Russian tank, which rolls over them (Tanque ruse). In a simultaneously hyper-realistic and almost abstract way, Rodríguez engages in a stylistic exercise, alternating between muted colors and bright touches; smooth glosses and thicknesses. Another tank, on paper this time (Tanque Ruso IV), drawn according to a Lego motif, is reminiscent of planet-exploring robots. We get the feeling these machine-vehicles are also tools of colonization and/or weapons of destruction. One of the deadly consequences of war, of course, is the spread of refugee camps. Rodríguez focuses here on several recent tragedies. Most refugees travelling from Africa in an attempt to reach Europe arrive at the Moria camp on the island of Lesbos in Greece (Moria Refugee Cam). In Havana, the locals who meet in the old city of the port, hoping to leave the island to flee the political, social and economic crisis that has beset Cuba, feel just as imprisoned, although it is not strictly a refugee camp (Havana Refugee Camp I). In Bangladesh, since 2017, hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees, mostly Muslims, have been fleeing a Burmese army offensive and now crowd together in dire sanitary conditions (Rohinyia Refugee Camp). The aesthetic and almost playful dimension of the wide shots seen from the sky engages the viewer in paradoxical ways. The Lego motif keeps the subject at a distance on the one hand, and subtracts the viewer from an immediate understanding of the object on the other. He is therefore torn between several perspectives on actions: playing, reorganizing, demolishing, building… The possibility of a reversal of meaning emerges at the same time as the reversal of the image.  In addition, three landscapes of dunes spread out in a palette of earthy tones and clay-like colors. Mechanical elements disrupt the apparent calm of these sandy, rocky expanses. The grey dunes of Bagnold (Bagnold Dune) are surveyed by a NASA geology robot in search of traces of water. Further on, a similar machine inspects the Jezero crater on the planet Mars (Jezero Crater). In 2021, the Perseverance rover confirmed that this crater was home to a lake some 3.6 billion years ago (Perseverance). Human beings, with constancy, watch for any trace of potential past lives, a presage of those they could invest in these extra-terrestrial spaces. These paintings, on canvas and on paper, borrow their iconography from Lego, one of the artist’s favorite motifs, which simultaneously represents the mediatization, digitalization, technologization, and pixelation of our universe. Realities are altered, fictions fragmented, echoing the multiple layers of languages and the plural interpretations of images. These plastic bricks also carry within them the possibility of collapse, of decadence. Incidentally, the planet Mars takes its name from the god of the Roman pantheon. The disturbances we cause in our fantasies of prosperity in all these territories suggest that any community driven by a desire for colonization would ultimately be an embodiment of the tutelary figure of the warlord.

Photo: Dagoberto Rodríguez, Ánforas III (7 bombs), 2020, Fired clay, allover dimension 28 x 196 x 84 cm, each 28 x 84 x 28 cm, © Dagoberto Rodríguez, Courtesy the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann

Info: Galerie Peter Kilchmann, 11-13 rue des Arquebusiers, Paris, France, Duration: 18/2-15/4/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.peterkilchmann.com/