Rodríguez Silva

Under the title Eco, Rodriguez Silva (Olivares, Seville, 1960) presents his fifth exhibition project at the Fernando Pradilla Gallery. The exhibition brings together a selection of works on canvas and paper made in the last two years; a work based on geometry and essentially focused on research with artistic materials and the plastic consequences of their exposure to specific circumstances.

Eco is articulated through the series Sensación geométrica, Subir al mar, Simultánea and Todo en algún lugar, using linen and paper as the supports for these new works. These are compositions that condense the linguistic repertoire of this artist, characterized by schematic thinking, material presence, the discipline of the diagram, the support as an active presence; the simplicity, in short, of the approaches and execution.

Rodríguez Silva exhibits for the first time pictorial canvases -his usual supports have been aluminum, iron or paper-, but for the artist, the canvas goes beyond its function as a support to compete conceptually with painting, subordinated to the material and volumetric character of the object-canvas, observing the presence of the pictorial substance, whether aqueous like acrylic paint or greasy like oil and wax. We are before an artist who defines himself as a painter who works in the third dimension, who exhorts the viewer to perceive and feel the physical qualities of form and space, the sensitive nature of the materials, and the connection with the pictorial process.

The title of the exhibition Eco, rather than a sonorous repetition that fades away in time and space, alludes in his work to a permanent rhythm, to an orderly and cadenced succession that keeps emitting active resonances, echoes of a painting that is present and absent at the same time, intuited and foreseen, expansive and always polysemic.

Thus, the exhibition goes through horizontal rectangles saturated with white, differentiated from each other by slight tonal variations that result in a white surface, volumetrically delimited by the edges of the canvas, a “painting of a painting” as occurs in the works of the Geometric Sensation series. Or the subtly invaded canvases, at the expense of their shape, color or texture of Subir al mar, pieces made by the accumulation of successive layers of semi-transparent white paint, which ensure that the color of the canvas itself underlies and decisively influences the final appearance of the work.

The works on paper, a support so dear to Rodríguez Silva, are found in the series Todo en algún lugar, a juxtaposition of rectangular modules with their intervened diagonal, arranged on a structure patterned in the manner of a lattice. The painting is sometimes visible and sometimes hidden, but its presence is revealed due to the transparency of the support and the inevitable signs of the process.

Based on the concept of modular ornamentation present on many facades of historic buildings in the city of Segovia, the so-called sgraffito, Rodríguez Silva presents a selection of works from his Simultaneous series, corresponding to the “Quintanar Project”; a site-specific that will be presented in July of this year at the Quintanar Palace in Segovia. In these canvases, the artist applies paint in the form of isolated linear rectangles arranged rhythmically according to a diagram, minimally occupying the surface of the canvas and allowing the support to gain prominence. These are nude paintings crisscrossed by a multitude of small scenes visible simultaneously.

Rodríguez Silva has always expressed his admiration for the first generation of Minimal, with Donald Judd and Robert Morris as his great referents. “Minimal directs the viewer's experience to the plane of phenomenology, also incorporating the body and space in the perceptual game. In the works of our artist, the surrounding space around the works is fundamental for them to expand in all their magnitude, placing them strategically to act as links between one and the other. The visual games act as words that, when put together, help us to understand the whole text. Nothing is left to chance, everything has its place and meaning. That is why, in Rodríguez Silva's case, it is more appropriate to speak of interventions than of exhibitions”. [...] “That pursuit of the essential, that going towards the true heartbeat of art in any of its manifestations. That is the authentic search of a creator, and that is where we find Rodriguez Silva, in that stripping of the superfluous to find the primordial, in that squinting of the eyes that lets us see”. [E.F.M.]