EROS AND CONTENTION

© Virginia Alberdi. 2002

Three canvas and four cardboards on oil, exhibited at Pequeño Espacio Gallery of the National Council of Plastic Arts, reveals the poetics of Rubén Rodríguez Martínez (Cárdenas, 1959), a painter who has achieved a particular style in the last few years, among the multiple exponents which characterizes the motley and explosive national pictorial scene.

Siluetas (Silhouettes) is the name of this sample that brings us closer to half of the way between thematic externalization and imaginative suggestion through a very personal understanding of Eros.

Acephalous figures take possession of space, intensely and strongly, arms, legs, sex within a placid appearance through hard strokes featuring these silhouettes over a colored background perfectly melted into the bodies.

This plastic solution is stressed by its restraint character which points at the essence of erotic experience as a sort of faith act on the attraction of corporal dialogue among human beings. Rubén visually asserts the amatory metaphor when excluding either the lyrical twee excess that pollutes the romantic visions of Eros many times or the brutal or scatological extreme which has become cool due to snobbism and ostentation from time to time.

Rodríguez has been coherent with an aesthetic creed that has remained unscathed to mutations, but not with the continuous and necessary recoding of his expressive means.

A year ago, on the score of the exhibition Dibujos y pinturas (Drawings and Paintings) at La Acacia Gallery, critic of art, Wendy Navarro, noted that, “ritual dimension presides approaching to the environment, eroticism, or hedonistic possibilities, where domestics as well as creation results in a significant part of itself”. By that time, Rafael Acosta countersigned that “eroticism in Rubén is authentic; it is not something imported or a d

Graduated from the National School of Arts in the specialties of painting, engraving and drawing in 1980, and founder of the René Portocarrero Serigraphy Workshop in 1984, Rubén Rodriguez – eyes and hands trained by the rigorous exercise of contemplation and domain of figures – walks in a state of grace that passes over those who enjoy his creation.