THE OTHERS IN OUR PORTRAIT
Portraits of Mariano E. Rodríguez
Identity, by Mariano E. Rodriguez, is a series static at the limit between the subject and his mask. The characters portrayed are seen with a certain perplexity, wearing the costumes with it have chosen to appear to the world. Those people who watch are questioned about the peculiarity that defines: identity as a naked face that shows their real essence, or some appearance meticulously designed to fit in society? Each character is presented as a two-faced mirror, exposing the artifice of identity and revealing their own vulnerability. The result of these stratagems is the construction of an appearance designed to satisfy the expectations of others.
Rodriguez understands just, in the end, we are all actors playing a role in the great theater of life, confined to a stage that does not resist the weight of representation. Every personality is a copy, a confinement that serves to expose, perhaps cruelly, the paradox of identity: being in a world where the perception of others is impossible to avoid, consequently, any attempt to legitimize ourselves becomes an attempt at permanent contradiction.
Rodriguez's series pushes us to consider the authenticity of our standards, and the impossible truths that contemporary society teaches us. Perhaps we are only masks, faces designed to avoid the judgment of others; a dilation between what we wish to be and what we are force to represent. The characters pose for the observer with a calculated intensity, and that intensity, far from being a manifestation of authenticity, is an affirmation of a most exasperated desire for surrender. In a society in which falseness has been naturalized to the point of becoming a daily habit, the author captures the precise moment, the instant in which the subject whispering: “I am this, but I am not this either”.
We can say these portraits are fragments of a parcial confession, in which the art is not trying reconcile, on the contrary, it is trying to exacerbate the conflict that exists between them. As we dwell on each of these images, we find that the characters are, in reality, states of mind stuck between the need for approval and the desire for authenticity, between brutal honesty and self-deception. Eventually, this series becomes a meditation on self and appearance; a brutal yet compassionate analysis of the tragedy of existing with no escape from the gaze of others. In Rodriguez's work, the portrait is an act of subversion and protest, a reflection on the human essence and the never-ending struggle to affirm oneself in a world that, paradoxically, has no margin for authenticity.
The artist deduces convergent gazes centered on the portrait with a subtlety that invites us to contemplate equidistant points of the same subject. In Mariano Rodriguez's work, the subjects invade the lens to affirm their differentiation. The “enlightened” characters occupy the focal point and affirm: “because I am different from the others, I am like my tribe, because I am...”. The series, far from judging, observes and reveals, and in this act of unadorned revelation, strips the individual naked before the observer. Rodriguez, in his art, offers neither answers nor consolation; he confronts us with that uncomfortable truth. Perhaps, in the end, we are nothing more than masks wandering through a universe of mirrors, unable to recognize ourselves in any of them.
THE OTHERS IN OUR PORTRAIT
Series commissioned by art critic Javier Cabrera, Tenerife, Spain. Exhibition / Sala de Arte Los Lavaderos / Eduardo Chevilly, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Tenerife, Spain
July 31, 2009 - August 21, 2009. Curated by: Javier Cabrera. Organized by: Sala de Arte Los Lavaderos
Includes works by Javier Betancor, Vicky Delgado, Rosario Heer, Carla Poticella, Mariano Rodriguez, Gabriela Camerotti Bertao, Andrea de Valentim, Fernando Sendra, Solange Pastorino, José Pilone, and Suci Viera.
Every man is built by his words, for what he say and he say about himself. The story of a man about himself is the only thing we have to build it.
Francis Bacon, painter
©All works belong to Mariano E. Rodríguez,