An image arises of an imaginary moment in an imagined future. To think of my body thinking about a moment conceived by someone else. A moment that appears with the full trappings of reality, yet diluted within the infinite archive of forms fabricated by the mind. Then another image comes, completely displacing the first. Even in the future, the original image may resurface, even if it fades with the slightest breath.
The image that came to my mind is of an African landscape with numerous animals, thirsty and reeking of savagery, yet among them are rather cosmopolitan pools of harsh sky-blue, as if imitating water, chlorinating reality. The image has already merged with my unconscious, and it is the image of a collage by Gabriel Rodríguez. I saw it in the past, and at some point in the future it returns to my mind, and perhaps it is through its almost perverse legibility that the image shares space in my mind with the plausible things that constitute the material of our imagination. Surely, the image will resurface again, and I will be absorbed in another moment. The image will be assumed as real, legitimate, with the megalomania of a dreamlike instant.
The task of visual communication in the present acquires an unconscious state of difficulty, whose model of formulation is progressively challenging. The tools that digital media provide us daily turn every human being into a potential generator of images capable of competing aesthetically with the creations of the greatest masters of the visual arts. Likewise, the reality experienced in the world is increasingly complex in its mixture of absurdity and madness, which can lead creative visual imagery to become a mere useless exercise, a baroque decoration, an applauded farce. Thus, the work of artists who start from concrete ideas and intuitive analyses capable of synthesizing, with simplicity, the graces presented by the world in its real state, gains particular force. Ideas, concepts, simple abstractions obtained from the environment in which life unfolds—that is the world that endures after the attempt to create art. This is the space where I place Gabriel Rodríguez and his work, which sometimes borders on the rudimentary and the sophisticated.
Gabriel is an artist who works tirelessly, and in his labor as a craftsman one senses an air of sweat, search, and experimentation. Until I became acquainted with the nuances of this work (Turismo), Gabriel was for me an artist capable of interpreting the complexity of the world through geometric, primary, and simple forms. That is why it is surprising to contemplate a spread of collages that mix all that glossy magazine aesthetic in a format of cutouts, scissors, and glue. And canvas and stretcher, and wall and gallery. Viewers and environments, and the world. The rest…
Collage is not an innovative technique. Photoshop itself is based on the technique of collage (superimposition and combination of individual planes) for creating composed, almost perfect images. Therefore, I examined Gabriel’s collages with some estrangement, only to be surprised by each of them, realizing that what Gabriel sought to do through this exercise was not to generate complex images, but to ironize humanity in its attitude as sovereign in a convulsive world.
Gabriel coats his work with the Baudrillardian concept of Hyperreality, transferring the images generated by his collages to the plane of a world fabricated by minds and communities that establish a parallel status, keeping us lethargic between desire, consumption, and mirage. Of course, the images we see through Gabriel’s collages turn out to be characters, landscapes, and challenges whose essence navigates between humor and sarcasm to show us an absurd world. Yet there is a dose of craftsmanship implicit in Gabriel’s work, which conveys to us the human capacity for truthfulness, to challenge fatalism, to convince us through our eyes that within the ergonomics of our own identity lies the key to solving our daily enigmas.
The images Gabriel created continue to present themselves in my mind, tying poles and stitching together disparate worlds. Challenging hierarchies and making the subordinate triumph over the powerful while fragmenting him and turning him into yet another accessory of stupidity. And I realize that Gabriel remains the artist who fuels his work through concept exploration; he is simply playing with our minds, leading them to that plane of hyperreality that allows us to better understand the world—not because Gabriel expressed himself legibly, but because we are trained to feel comfortable with deception.
— Alejandro Paz