PANORAMICA
Arte Emergente en Venezuela 2000/2012
Predicting in 1968 that in the future, everyone would be world-famous for 15 minutes’, Andy Warhol anticipated just how soon that future would come and how long a quarter of an hour would feel then. The future did soon come, and with it arrived oversize events, myriad experiences, countless personalities, a sense of urgency, and a loss of boundaries between the global and the personal.
Alongside fame, the
super-productive gland, developed an industry of endless change, of instant
propagation and cognition. We’ve seen stars born and falling, media created and
destroyed, voices in crescendos and silence. Come to think of it, it’s
surprising that anything appears to be lasting at all.
The very instruments of
longevity are materials in the practices of Riccardo Previdi and Javier
Rodriguez. The artists witness the ongoing collapse of the universal into the
particular, and the solid into the abstract. Crossing scales and time
signatures, they lay foundations for monuments to the fleeting, the abandoned,
and the disowned.
MULTIPLICITY WITHIN UNITY
Javier Rodriguez’s new work “Multiplicity
within unity” renders world-changing events plastic and pliable, by setting
news headlines in ink-stamp rubber. Mimicking the lithographic printing
process, in which lithos, stone,
pressed against paper, makes a lasting impression, here, the stories and events
are variable and potential. In this home-office format, factual events which
may themselves be engraved in stone in monuments or memorials, are available to
all to reproduce and alter by hand.
CHRONICLES
In Chronicles, Rodriguez undertakes a consistent deconstruction of the canonical views of world history – as presented by textbooks and encyclopaedic publications. Page by page and event by event, the artist punches holes in long-held beliefs and authoritative versions, producing party confetti in the process. History becomes pop.
THE REPETITION IS NOT REALLY VERY OFFENSIVE. ITS INTENTIONAL
Inked Photolithographic Aluminium Plates.
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FIA 2012 Fundación Cisneros
Works produced at Skowhegan Residency program.
NO PHOTO FINISH, work series taken from the front page of the
Daily News tabloid from New York. The image is deconstructed by over-photocopying it and transferred to Silkscreen frames.
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La obra de Javier Rodríguez, artista venezolano residenciado en Londres, se inscribe dentro de este compendio artístico designado recientemente por el crítico Nicolas Bourriaud como Postproducción: entorno de creación y reacción donde los factores manipulados no respiran ya desde las posibilidades acrisoladas de la “materia prima” sino que se infiltran en los ritmos vigentes de objetos que ya están circulando en el mercado cultural y que han sido alimentados, manipulados e “informados por otros”.
En el caso de la muestra Doble discurso todo este desempeño contemporáneo se enfoca en una larga relación que el creador ha sostenido con las verdades ocultas y las sigilosas legitimaciones que los medios de comunicación asientan en la vida cotidiana del ciudadano común, ya convertido en espectador silente frente a las repetidas aseveraciones, los invariables modelos y las aprovechadas estructuras desarrolladas según los intereses de turno. La prensa escrita, los libros de escolaridad, la publicidad, el video, los errores de la rotativa, los ruidos de la imagen gráfica y el desvanecimiento de la palabra impresa son algunos de los elementos que Rodríguez integra a través de una serie de piezas que dialogan desde sí mismas para hacer estallar los linderos escenográficos de una gran instalación. Lugar postproducido donde el arte es la estrategia para develar interrogantes, zanjas destapadas de una historia narrada por otros ante la cual rendimos el propio criterio y doblegamos nuestra autonomía.
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They don't know why, but they keep doing it
Ideas after ideology
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They don’t know why, but they keep doing it brings together six artists whose practices reflect on the role of ideology in a post-ideological landscape. Ideologies structure and simplify reality. They emerge where the Symbolic is not able to adequately translate the Real. We resort to using simplification, brand historical concepts, we give names to movements and phenomena.
The artists, aware of these mechanisms, reject the obvious, doubting the potential of ideologised thought and production. Working in paint, installation and video, they expand into the post-participatory, the post-media, and chart the past-punk and the past-colonial.
Exhibition curated by Piotr Sikora and Pierre d'Alancaisez.
MIRROR WORLD
Rodriguez manipulates media messages - through a subversion
of the sombre tone of political slogan, through placing serious real-life
situations in overtly banal contexts, and by fabricating stories with the
authority of a newspaper editor – in direct response to media’s own
manipulation of reality.
The new publication work launched with the exhibition They don’t know why,
but they keep doing it has ambitions of
similar scale. The content of the publication is not settled at the time of
writing, but the recent scandals relating to phone hacking and the resulting
closure of The News of the World,
Britain’s best-selling newspaper, open up an array of issues.
When producing his newspaper works, Rodriguez learned about the amount of waste generated by the lithographic printing process. For every thousand copies of a newspaper, a few are damaged or printed incorrectly, and many hundreds are at the end of a run are scrapped. Printing houses re-use such waste by printing multiple pages on top of each other in tests, and in cleaning procedures. This way, today’s news is an increment of yesterday’s rejected headlines, and pages eventually become saturated with type, images and ink. This discovery has prompted Rodriguez to develop a non-verbal vocabulary which mirrors that of his publications. Panels of rich magentas and cyans, or pallets filled with stacks of overprinted graphic novels are at once product, archive and waste. Through the very means of mechanical reproduction, the newspaper comments upon itself, amplifying its headline out of recognition until it becomes aesthetic noise.
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Javier Rodriguez’s installationPrincipal Peripherals of storage creates a series of puzzles seemingly unintelligible to the naked eye. Using a large number of maculaturas – overprint sheets of paper found in printing houses – together with wooden shipping pallets, the artist has created an intricate environment: a series of islands and a multi-layered labyrinth. The pallet platforms support an array of prints on paper composed in an abstract (though conceivably logical) chromatic and thematic progression – each of those has received multiple impressions of pages from newspapers, magazines, advertising and packaging. The text and images are pressed one on top of the other and out of register, creating levels of saturation, both of colour and content, not found in regular publications.
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The Venezuelan Pavilion project evokes a model of national and universal exhibitions that have been taking place around the globe since we first heard of the industrial revolution, with the aim to reassert and disseminate the idea of progress.
Similar to other Latin American states that regained their independence during the 19th century, Venezuela adopted the grandiloquent image of those fairs. Likewise it allowed itself to be seduced by the allures of modernity.
The works by Daniel Medina, Magdalena Fernandez, Jaime Castro, Federico Ovalles-Ar, Javier Rodriguez and Ivan Candeo, conceived from a contemporary standpoint, are not defined by the national context they come from, but rather through a well thought exploration of some model strategies of representation that expose the clash between vernacular aspirations and foreign patterns. In this manner, abstraction and nature, professional architecture and popular edification, the act of representation and reality, converge in a hybrid panorama, saturated by anachronisms and reverences. Consequently the exhibition introduces a comment, not exempt from irony, over the Venezuela’s current situation and the construction of visuality, and outlines a "cultural geography" constituted from appropriations done in vain as well as from fruitful mistakes.
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Chromatic Aberrations is the culmination of Javier Rodriguez’s three month residency in the Greatorex Street Warehouse space. The work pays homage to the dual functions of the warehouse space itself, recognising its function as workshop, storage facility, processing plant and, during the residency, artist’s living space.
In the work Rodriguez explores the relationship between product and process in mass media production. Using overprint sheets and cleaning rolls recycled from industrial printing presses, Rodriguez takes the physical surplus of the printing process and uses it to interrogate the transience of contemporary print media. The overprints, or 'maculaturas', are displayed on heavy wooden pallets, their position determining our course through the exhibition space. On the walls long banners of blurred news-type reference the over-saturation created by constant news production. This impression is reinforced by the posters with which Rodriguez papers the walls of the warehouse, composites of the lurid news-type of the Venezuelan and British popular press.
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1 encuentro internacional de intervencion urbana “Espacio diverso” Quito. Ecuador.
LA VOZ
Espacio diverso fue una convocatoria organizada en el marco de la celebracion de los 200 años de la batalla de pichincha.
En sus pautas estuvo propiciar la accion artistica abordando los espacios urbanos de la provincia como lienzo contenedor de las acciones de artistas nacionales e internacionales.
La extraccion y apropiación de “la noticia” asi como su manipulacion y reinserción en el espacio publico fueron las matrices de donde partió esta propuesta.
Un afiche noticioso donde el encabezado- extracto del himno regional de Pichincha- funcionó como collage junto a otros elementos: Imagenes de la segunda Guerra mundial, anuncio publicitario de telefonia movil entre otros.
La imagen en su totalidad, representó un encuentro ambiguo de confrontación sobre diversas versiones de lo real, y en especial dentro de la conmemoración de la Batalla de Pichincha.
Se imprimieron 400 afiches los cuales fueron instalados en espacios públicos de la ciudad de Quito, pasando a formar parte del cotidiano visual del habitante común.
