UNDER PRESSURE

© Orlando Hernández. 2004

It does not make sense trying to define, precise, describe painting. For many, it is a task as pernicious as useful. Perhaps, it could be said that Rubén Rodríguez painting is erotic and mystic. But that is as evident as they are paintings, painted cardboards. And many other similar things could be noted. It is dark. Dramatic. All seems to be hemmed in, under pressure. It encloses a soft expressionism. But speaking or writing about darkness standing in the middle of the night, or about religion before God presence, or about eroticism at the most delight moment is to waste, absurdly, the best experience. Watching at paintings should be like painting. And it is, after all. The same way a good reader should be considered a special kind of writer, only if we are able to live up all of our senses and not just the little balls of eyes while watching, while reading; only if watching, reading implies a sacrifice at least equivalent to that of the painter, the writer or just the one who creates something that we call art later from a comfortable stand view. It think that Rubén ́s painting reveals a guy who suddenly and unchastely, shows his bowels, guts, his guts heart, veins, nerves included and not just a skin vainly dressed up or mistreated by the use and abuse of tendencies and fashion. Rubén present exhibition is not at all the exercise of a fresher that tries his resources, his techniques, his job for the first time of what we have been partially informed from time to time, but the matured, complex work of an artist who has kept hidden his terrors, believes, pleasures from a long time and, today, he decided to make them explode in front of us so that we explode too. Seizing this odd opportunity depends only on us right now.