MOCA GA / Calendar

“Painting for me is open to all fictions and possibilities: stains, hard edges, loops, tangled scribbles, color as palpable space, architectural form mutating into biological structure. It is a space in which discordant images and references combine to suggest a world where nothing is fixed and everything is in the process of becoming. The imagery in my work evokes a range of references from cellular structure to world maps, suggesting relationships between disparate systems such as the social, the physical, and the political. Nature, the cosmos, private conflicts coexist in a sensual disorder and merge in a metaphorical landscape of the mind, creating visual forms that act as surrogates for addressing larger philosophical or conceptual concerns. My visual vocabulary encompasses the organic, the mechanical, the digital, the graphic, and the painterly. I begin with exploratory, personal drawings that become the DNA material of the paintings. These are scanned into the computer and manipulated in order to bring elements into the work that opposes my hand. When I return to the canvas or paper, I reach for physicality once again and draw from my own imagery in a new visual complexity born of the synthesis of the physical and material with the digital. 

The Wall drawing evolved out of a series of studies that I did for a larger painting. The painting was never made because the preparatory drawings were more interesting to me as drawings than as an idea to be explored further on canvas. When faced with the space for the project at MOCA GA, a long wall alongside a ramp, my intent was to create a non-narrative landscape that moved quickly from left to right but one that also implied a receding three- dimensional pictorial space.  I perceived the initial drawing as large creating dynamic movement within the composition that animated the interior narrow physical space allowed.  Without being literal about my references, both the city and nature play a part in this ‘abstract landscape’. The choice of vine charcoal with small amounts of compressed was intentional as a transitory medium, one that can be literally ‘blown away’ or brushed off. I wanted the impermanence of this medium to underscore the temporary nature of this installation. In addition, charcoal can express great tonal variance, and is close to the hand — messy, dirty, but very tactile and this is essentially what drawing is for me.”

– Rocío Rodríguez

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