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Indepth Arts News:
"Michael Rodriguez: Recent Paintings"
2004-01-10 until 2004-02-21
g-module
Paris, ,
FR France
g-module will present the first solo exhibition in Europe of New York based painter Michael Rodriguez, consisting of recent acrylic paintings on canvas and ink and gouache drawings on paper. Featured in the cave, will be a video installation by Israeli born, LA based artist, Eddo Stern.
Michael Rodriguez’s acrylic paintings of the late 1990s were a complex and excessive mixture of seductive orbs, ritualistically painted amidst digital like fissures, colorfield patches of negative space and constructions of lines. The paintings, referring to abstract expressionism, feminity and beauty, were plugged into a period of growth in productivity and technology via electronics, fashion and medicine.
Rodriguez continues a methodical processing of his environment via his signature, transient orbs of acrylic paint, ink and flocking on canvas and more recently on paper. Only, for the beginning of this 21st century, the works are condensed in a complex materiality to the purity of whiteness. In the recent works, he seeks to "root the viewer to the present" while signaling "a complex multi-dimensional reality". His is a contemporary abstraction fusing a "material seduction with a kind of intuited working process as related to the processes of nature". For Rodriguez, this notion defines a new "intuited model of nature driven by the desire for beauty and a return to the archaic".
Born in Miami, Florida, Michael Rodriguez has exhibited in galleries and non-profit spaces in the United States and Canada. His work first appeared at g-module in the space’s inaugural show, Pop Science in 2001. He is recently the recipient of the NYFA Fellow and the Pollack-Krasner Grant. Michael Rodriguez’s works can also be seen at the g-module stand at the NADA artfair, Miami Beach, December 4-7, 2003
Much like Eddo Stern’s widely screened Sheik Attack (2000), Vietnam Romance (2003) is compiled from the sources available on the computer desktop environment – games, graphics and music. A remix of the Vietnam war experience with a MIDI soundtrack and computer game clips, Vietnam Romance is a tour of nostalgia for romantics and deathmatch veterans. Feel the Nam, the Elephant Grass, the Red Clay, the Cong and the Rain, Feel the Nam….A last chance to consider a lesson lost.
Eddo Stern is an Israeli born multimedia artist currently living in Los Angeles. Later this season his works will be presented at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York and at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. He is a co-founder of the Los Angeles based cooperative media lab, C-level (http://www.c-level.cc/). Vietnam Romance courtesy Postmaster’s, New York City.
IMAGE
M. Rodriguez
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