A Sense of Possibility
Curated by Roos Gortzak
Weningrüll Karlsruhe
7 December 2013 – 4 January 2014
Having sat down today behind my computer to write a press release for Rodrigo’s show at Weingrüll, I thought it would be more interesting to share these stories with you. Closer also to Rodrigo’s work, which isn’t about getting it, about fixating meaning, but about keeping things open, in a contingent state. For those of you who have seen Rodrigo’s work when he was still studying here at the academy in Karlsruhe, you might recognize certain motives: the white paper cup, the disembodied head, the amorphous objects out of rice
paper, the structures referring to architecture. More importantly, you might recognize a certain set-up, a kind of two- or three-dimensional riddle, in which the motives function like letters in an alphabet, although they are never exactly have the same function. The riddle isn’t ever there to be solved. It invites you -or at least in my interpretation- to abstract the arrangements we currently have in place in order to understand one another .
Objective truths are not what we find at the basis of knowledge, but rather a set of agreements that make us believe we have a grasp on the world. It is like the man standing in front of a glass sliding door, who figures in several of Rodrigo’s drawings and paintings in this show. The man is looking at his own reflection, but when approaching it, the doors open and the image disappears. To quote René Magritte, whose 1929 article “Les Mots et les Images” (in which he explores the relationship between an object, its image and the title it is given) is one of Rodrigo’s departing points: “We see the world as being outside ourselves, although it is only a mental representation of it that we experience inside ourselves.” Last summer, when I was writing a review for a Mexican magazine on Rodrigo’s show in Luzern, Rodrigo sent me a link to a video in which curator Giovanni Carmine says that “thinking is just finding new connections between things that you didn’t think were connected.” I like how this can be seen as a motto for looking at Rodrigo´s show. More recently I discovered an audio work by poet and critic Quinn Latimer for Marisa Merz’s show at the Serpentine Gallery in London. It struck me how much it could have functioned as an audio for Rodrigo’s works. I’ll finish this text here with the last words of Quinn’s piece: “What greets you as your eyes close, what opens, what extraordinarily thing?”
Roos Gortzak
