Paper Labyrinths

The first time I witnessed the work of Patricio Rodriguez, I was astonished by the incredible preciseness of even its most minute of details, it was as if I was observing the work of a machine expertly designed to portray subjectivity . From that day on, I could not help but be reminded Jacques Derrida’s famous words and his precise assertion that "there is nothing outside the text". Truly, an image of totality in which the text amplified the scriptural character and embraced -among other things- a tear, an incision, and where the ideographic twists and folds make an "instituted imprint" on reality. And this notion of an imprint, of membrane made up of by many layers, connects well with the images created by this artist, in which the influence of his background as an engraver is plain to see. national imagery. The pastoral stamps of Laplante, Garneray or Landaluze, for example, modeled a highly subjective and aestheticizing criterion that concealed the hegemony of colonial power. Engraving as a camouflaged portayal, as a multiplicity that painted the crude historical reality. But through all the possible discourse, engraving has undoubtedly been an ever- changing manifestation in the cultural soul of Cuba.

The teaching of Carmen Mendez in his elementary education and later at the San Alejandro Academy, the influences of Eduardo Hernandez, Norberto Marrero, Alexander Richard and, above all, Belkis Ayon, set a path of influences and inquiries at the beginning of Patricio Rodriguez's career. The generational change that transpired in Cuban Art in the 1990s- which Lupe Alvarez referred to as "the return to labor"- was marked by a paradox: said labor came marred by the dismal deficiencies of the "Special Period". Art had to and did diversify its material qualities, qualities whose only room for improvisation was found in scarcity, as "ontology of precariousness". Hence, the affinity for detailed manual labor that can often be observed in many of the artists trained in this generation or influenced by it.

That said, perhaps we can understand this factual obsession that makes this artist achieve that Luddite fantasy portayed by Lewis Mumford in "Technique and Civilization"; the hand that creates the machine does not wish to lose its vitality as a "technological artifact" protected by the idea of manual precision. This is why the papers engravings of Patricio Rodriguez have an almost machine-like appearance, they are precise as sophisticated gears "human, all too human".Therein lies one of the many charms of his work, that the millimetric reproduction of a reality recreated on paper, atomizes the sameness of the images that, once superimposed, compose a sort of dreamlike fractal.

The hand, the cutter, a sheet of paper and time are for Patricio Rodriguez metaphysical tools with which he reconstructs chaos and order. Chaos is seen in the tears; the interrupted form, the missing fragment that simultaneously makes visible the glimpses of another reality, of another coupled image that merges and allows itself to be drained by successive layers that end up being substance. Order is the unusual harmony, a balance expressed in successive cuts and ties that form an interlacing of image and background, phenomenon and foundation that end up engraving a beautiful and complex image like the ignotic spiral of a nautilus shell.

Traces, lines, perimeters, casts, faces, and maps of the intrinsic and the imagined outline the forms of their displacements. Havana-Monterrey-Miami have been three vital cities for Patricio Rodriguez, cities which have marked milestones in his work, and through which he has passed leaving a triangular route bounded by successive lines of comings and goings not very different from those he uses in his paper labyrinths. And this territoriality makes sense once it is translated into images with an effect of interiority. Images that do not aim for immediate aesthetic gratification, nor the polish that ignores the conflicts of life, but rather that dilutes them in shreds of paper that serve as synaptic and metaphorical connections. This analogy does not seem so far-fetched to me, especially when I discover the brain as a But at the same time, this travel experience has also influenced his work from a spatial, material and thematic point of view. In Havana -as previously mentioned, there was this ''ontology of precariousness'' - the impossibility of having a variety in artistic mediums resulted in paper becoming an almost unique material on which to create improvised variations, such as dyeing it with ink and oil, since it was impossible to find industrially produced canvas. The space available to work in Cuba was much broader, as the artist had a spacious garage converted into a studio, where the ample space favorable for creation betrayed the ever present material scarcity; one of those many paradoxes found in Cuban life. In the themes there was also an organic influence of a certain anthropological inquiry, not unlike that of Juan Francisco Elso Padilla, especially in that use of the figure of man and his spiritual and natural reminiscences, seen in works such as ''Se va pero lleva su pedazo de ciudad'' (He leaves but he takes his piece of city with him)(2006) and ''Donde encuentra la sombra''(Where the shodow is found) (2006).

Once installed in Monterrey, Mexico, a sophistication in the staging of the works and their material varieties can be observed. Works such as ''El ojo''(The eye) (2011) and ''El nido''(The nest) (2013), which were wood fretworked, show the technical growth which expanded possibilities of his artistic discourse. The formats grow larger as well and the variety of color results in the parting from scarcity as a creative limit. There is also a theme that has been important for Patricio Rodriguez, especially after the loss of an indispensable person in his life, his grandmother, who, without being a blood relative, occupied a primordial place in the members, and also the loss of his father: death as an impact on the personal psyche. This theme is especially obvious ''La exposición de las calacas'' (The calacas exhibition)(2012), life and death linked by that symbol so important in the Mexican cultural imagery that has in the celebration of the Day of the Dead its apotheosis: the skull or calaca.

Today in Miami, apparently passing through because Patricio Rodriguez is nurtured from travel by a sense of freedom that seeks to avoid territorial roots, his work reaches a level of synthesis that displays creative maturity. Left behind is his Havana garage, now replaced by a neutral space overflowing with paper and ideas where to recompose the imaginary. All these stages of the search for material and conceptual possibilities, in addition to his work, are undertaken with a precision that not only shows the conquest of artistic labor but also the possibility of absorbing life and its twists in a creative manner. The high pace of contemporary life in the capitalist societies of the first world forces one to fast rhythm that has absolutely nothing to do with the relaxed manner of life in the tropics, where time melts in a surreal form. And that effect of completeness and sagacity of series such as the series ''Circles'' (2020), which with a spherical shape establishes a connotation of universality, creates interior worlds like layers not only symbolic but also experiential, sedimented by his intertwined journey. Or more recent series such as ''The Voyeur'' (2022), where the literal character and the ''destructive unveiling'' that observes the philosopher Byung-Chul Han in pornography is annulled with a poetic subtlety, the artist carves pornographic photography where the separation from the ordinary and the sexually explicit spectators, the power of evocation. Beauty as a vail.

The search for an inner rhythm in Patricio Rodriguez's compositions very much reminds me of the Orphism coined by Apollinaire in 1913, which sought color as a notorious element in that geometric and dynamic ordering. Undoubtedly, the use of geometric forms as a redoubt more than a formal one, favors an argumentation with certain referential contacts. In the specific case of engraving, the work of the monumental Maurits Cornelis Escher, serves as influence in the way Patricio Rodriguez uses forms that multiply their concrete silhouettes, becoming abstract, or vice versa; forms that from a certain grade of abstraction acquire legible character by the juxtaposition of layers that are nothing other than deposits of senses. A succession of tessellations that, in Escher's own words, lead to "metamorphosis".

Patricio Rodriguez literally engraves reality. He disintegrates the fullness of the images, often sustained as allegorical artifice, to decompose them in total consequence with his work as an engraver. His images are multiple traces, perforated fragments that in their disintegration, take shape like a large interior space that results in fissures through which a notion of beauty can be drawn like hermeneutic of the visceral.

Patricio Rodriguez's work is kaleidoscopic. A successive unfolding of images that go over themselves as aesthetic atomization that prevents the panoptic and prophylactic obsession of contemporaneity. That which fixes in the unpolluted and literal a security of the standardized beauty. This artist flees from totality, reverse, the trumpet-tree at sunset. Rainer Maria Rilke commented that the act of seeing was like a wound, a penetration into the unknown of the self from a hollowness. This is the creative universe of Patricio Rodriguez, an opening towards the complex. A glimpse into the successive lines carved by subjectivity.