Rocío Rodríguez was born in Cuba in 1952. She then moved to the United States as child and grew up in many states, including Florida, Kansas, and Georgia. However, her home state of Georgia is where her creation and love for art really took off. There, she studied at the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia (BFA 1976, MFA, 1979). Through her education, Rocio found herself continuing in the tradition of Abstract Expressionists, as she devised a language of scrapes, squiggles and large blemishes to express her perceptions of the environment.
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Inspirations
Abstract, gestural, and painterly, Rodríguez's works are subjective meditations drawn from memory and experience. Rodríguez cites her multicultural background as an important source of inspiration. Her works are also inspired by this central overarching question, "what is the nature of a specific thing if it can be represented in various ways, even in opposing ways?". This query has led to an examination of her own creative process by dissecting the image down to its rawest forms. Pedestals, boxes of color, and fragments of paint are stacked within her canvases and drawings as a way of offering up an image that elevates the parts of the whole, thus building via deconstruction. Rocío's artwork aims at creating a very controversial feel as it displays tension through dynamic conversation. Simply put, Rodriguez’s paintings are about painting as she gets back to the basics.
Art
Rodriguez’s most recent body of work, Neither Here nor There was made during a residency in Marfa, Texas. It captures her response to the open desert as most of her inspirations come from nature. The landscape, light, and her mood filter through uneven stacks of vibrant rectangular and square shapes that spill and overflow with color. Two elements, color and line. It offers two systems of denoting space and place; one is coloristic, ambiguous, the other is linear, harder edged, and provisionally clearer. Consisting of stacked sections to form blocks, each could be a mini-painting in its own right, their surfaces animated by a wild array of marks. Her palette is equally compelling as the glow of rose or gold-orange sweetens the grays, blacks, and whites. They are set against a rich ground of neutral shades that are subtly warmed and emit a low pervasive heat—arranged along the recessionals of an invisible one-point perspective diagram.
Another work by Rocío includes Wet Cluster. This work shows overlaid, complex brushwork that is scumbled, scratched, squiggled, smeared, melting into each other, the brilliance of orange-gold, say, forced back by small tautly outlined rectangles of grey and black. But the brightness seeps through and around them, in a beautiful orchestration. It represents the tangible raw energy that makes her process memorable. In this painting, florid pyramids of vigorously scratched surfaces, which might be mistaken for a child’s uncontrolled rigor, capture the environmental assault on her sensibility and elicit a visceral reaction to her application of paint. Rodriguez’ seemingly reflexive marks combined with her flamboyant use of reds, yellows, mauves, greys, and black convey a palpable urgency and momentum to her response to the desert. Here her uneven and fractured scores both confirm and deny order to great effect.