Rocío Rodríguez tears painting down to build it back up
Rodríguez holds onto the essential in Purge at Sandler Hudson Gallery
by Grace Thornton
Rocío Rodríguez's exhibit Purge nods to the literary technique of "killing your darlings." It involves destroying that which you love most about your work in the hope of purifying it: The less it takes to tell a meaningful story, the more each part of the story weighs.
Rodríguez began the painting process for Purge with a written list of contradictory, elaborate, swarming thoughts: "fast thinking is not prone to doubt," "What kind of whole you get when you meld clashing parts....feelings of disruption, instability, I want the process to remain fluid change things as I go." With these current works she aims to destroy the expectations she has of her chosen medium. Born in Cuba and based in Atlanta, Rodriguez is an accomplished artist with a long and distinguished career. In Purge, she veers away from the style she's developed over the last three decades perhaps to remove herself from painting as she has always known it to find what she can sift from the ashes.
Rodríguez toys with the essentialism of the "kill your darlings" mantra, taking a neurotic, heavily documented approach of destroying by restriction. She has eschewed canvases and the first works scrawl across sheets of paper that seem ripped from the artist's sketchbook. She confines the paintings, done in charcoal, pastel, and oil pastel, mostly to a rainbow of grays. Occasionally, depthless black splashes or crisp white squares interrupt. Bursts of mustard yellow, dusty browns, and reds, peppered with vagrant flecks of charcoal, appear threatening. The earthy colors appear as a blaze that begins in works 1-12, and grows to a critical mass until the flame has nothing left to feed on. It smolders, black and smoky, in the final paintings, the searing colors re-creating the destructive energy Rodríguez channeled when producing the work.
Titled by the date they were made, Rodríguez's first 12 paintings document her obedience to her own rules. As the series progresses, the shapes become simpler and more repetitive, allowing themes to emerge. She draws boxes, stacks and stacks of them, as well as nests formed by unbroken lines looped upon themselves. Eventually, the paintings are applied directly to the wall. "Purge," the series' title work, seems to take ownership of the gallery space like menacing ivy. The left panel features chalk applied so lightly that I watched flecks of it tumble with the breeze and cling a few inches later to the eggshell wall paint. It crawls across two adjacent walls and grows darker, feels more final, as it progresses from left to right, culminating in an expanse of smeared chalk, gray and visceral, in which you can picture the artist's sweeping arm movements.
By refusing to stylize her paintings as she normally would, Rodríguez gets to see them unpolished and frantic. Through Purge's revised painting process, Rodríguez poetically communicates the mental reconstruction required of an experimenting artist while attaining a clearer grasp of what painting means to the painter.
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