Ongoing - CDMX - Mexico

daniela franco

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27.01.2023

"Playlist" by Rodolfo Díaz Cervantes

At Saenger Galería, Mexico City

Ten years ago, I wrote Arquitecto de su propio destino [Architect of one’s own destiny], a short text on the work of Rodolfo Díaz Cervantes whose title (a favorite phrase) is still valid to describe the creative research that RoDiCe (plastic even in the acronym) has carried out since then and whose result is presented in the Playlist exhibition: a group of works whose material and aesthetic coherence gives, despite their age, the impression of a retrospective.

Since then, I have watched Rodolfo work in the everyday and in the professional, from my own perspective as a conceptual artist, both amazed and intrigued by the three-dimensional and by his mastery and intimate knowledge of the material.

Despite knowing him, having visited his studio numerous times and being familiar with his personal and collaborative trajectory, my first visit to Playlist is unexpected because it reveals a new facet within our familiarity. In a guided tour, the artist narrates the pieces as if they, still loaded with symbolism, were given almost unintentionally; as if until two days ago they had only existed as separate objects somewhere in his studio (and his mind).

The distribution of the pieces in the space makes the guided tour legible even in the absence of the artist, precisely because it is similar to his creative process: discreet, gentle, almost overwhelmed by the practicality of his daily work and yet, suddenly, when this process must be emptied into work, improbable objects give shape to beautiful sculptures that coexist with complete sincerity.

The title of that first text was obviously a nod to his training and the work he does, parallel to her artistic exploration, through Tornel: a design and production workshop from which he has collaborated with other artists and architects such as Tatiana Bilbao, Frida Escobedo and Sarah Lucas, as well as with the Swiss studio Herzog & de Meuron. His work from Tornel, molding materials to reach functional and aesthetic solutions, could have produced a cold and “high-end” personal work, but it has had the opposite result: organic objects and sculptures from stone and metallic elements that he recovers, saves and solves in his work.

It is relevant to talk about his parallel career because in it he has developed an admirable talent for solving. Rodolfo Díaz Cervantes has a personal relationship with matter and its intrinsic value. And it is that, from a practical work in which materials are needed to fulfill a function, he has ended up knowing exactly the aesthetic potential of the non-functionality of an object.

The very large, brightly lit space on the second level of Saenger gallery receives the pieces that conform Playlist as if they have always been there; which is not at first obvious since, in contrast to the large format works in less discrete color palettes that have been exhibited in the same space, the sculptures and pieces made of brass, metal, copper and other essential materials could be lost in the industrial magnitude and yet are organically integrated.

The title of the exhibition comes from a curious process to which Díaz Cervantes has resorted to name his pieces (or avoid doing so). Traditionally, Untitled is usually used as a form of demarcation, to reveal as little as possible of the work, leaving an interpretative margin (Untitled Film Still #21 by Cindy Sherman sounds much better than Young Woman in 1950s New York). Rodolfo, however, has ceded this task to his most listened-to songs on Spotify. By solving the problem in a seemingly random way, he gives his pieces names that remain personal and perhaps more telling (of the artist and the work) than carefully chosen and, by the same token perhaps, artificial titles.

Díaz has a preference for certain sinuous forms (such as the figure of the snake or the trajectory of a ball bouncing in space) and the way in which they direct the gaze; the distribution of the pieces echoes this preference by marking a path and at the same time allowing an overview from the first view.

Although most of his sculptures are of small and medium format, the center of the exhibition is occupied by the paper print of a giant black butterfly: Born Under the Punches is the largest and most explicit piece of the tour that, while revealing one of the underlying narrative lines (all the fears, fear), does not dominate over the rest of the works, but like several pieces of Playlist leaves room to continue the reading according to our personal superstitions. Born Under the Punches also announces another recurring idea in many of his works: the unfolding.

One of my favorite works, and perhaps a sort of pièce de résistance of the exhibition, is Dance Me to the End of Love, a metal and glass box (that for those of familiar with markets and bus terminals in Mexico recognize it as a display for selling jellies) filled with eggshells. The stand alone is gorgeous, and the thoughtful reappropriation is a nod to Duchamp’s bottle holder. However, Dance Me to the End of Love goes beyond the bottle holder because Díaz Cervantes turns it into a work by decontextualizing it while insisting on its main function (container) by filling it with eggs.

The symbolic multiplicity of the egg was recurrently explored in feminist works and actions by conceptual artists (almost all of them Brazilian) in the 1970s and 1980s. But, with the exception of Anna Maria Maiolino, who, in a performance, walks on eggshells recreating the English expression “walking on eggshells”, the other artists use other materials to simulate the figure of the egg. In O ovo (1967), an installation by Lygia Pape, the public entered a cube covered with a thin cloth that they had to push to get out, thus simulating the birth from the shell. In the series Endless Egg (1985), Maria Bartuszová recreates in plaster perfect ovoid forms that she then subjects to different destructive processes; and Lenora de Barros plays, in a series of visual poems, with the formal similarity between the ping-pong ball and the egg.

The intact eggshell, and not only its simulated form, is a recurring material in Díaz Cervantes’ work. By subjecting the symbolic load of the egg to physical conditions (overcrowding, support, emptying) that evidence its material fragility, he ends up exposing its conceptual potential in the same delicate and maternal way as the artists who precede him in this research. The egg perfectly exemplifies the way in which, from curiosity and with respect for the materials with which he works, Rodolfo arrives at an unexpectedly conceptual result.

In the Playlist guided tour, Díaz describes some of the pieces as an extension of himself at different stages, some works are physical interpretations of his body (in their weight or size) or of his relationship to the sensual. Most of these pieces, or at least their materials, lived with him for years in his studio, not as material to be transformed into potential works, as is often the case with found-object artists, but as objects full of formal value.

Unlike other artists who also work with everyday elements in Mexico, Díaz is less interested in the peculiarity or cultural charge of these objects and more in the suggestion that arises from their unexpected and subtle pairing; in this sense, his pieces are less akin to the generation of social sculpture and more to Jimmie Durham’s associations of objects.

In addition to the egg, Diaz Cervantes has other materials or fetish objects. Some are full of symbolism, such as copper, which for him is “an almost magical material, like an amulet, but for domestic use” and which is part of many of his tactile works. Others end up being so accidentally, like the rubber balls that he once bought by lot and that have given rise to his floating calligraphies: modules of copper wire that guide the gaze in the air, punctuating it with a sort of playful planets.

The reappropriation of materials in a soft and moldable medium becomes even more evident when trying to describe the pieces: a mesh rolled over a nixtamal unexpectedly gives rise to an aesthetic and sensual mini volcano in Sensations of Cool; a metal bracket nailed to a log ceases to be so in Harlem River to become a character-object (somehow reminiscent of Duchamp’s hat-holder) as beautiful as it is strange and yet gives the impression of everydayness (aren’t brackets always nailed to a piece of log?). In the beautiful Le temps de l’amour, a carved tezontle stone looking at itself in front of a sheet of aluminum is transformed for a moment into an autoerotic image, like a photogram of a pre-Hispanic Jean Cocteau.

Despite the references to Duchamp or Durham, his process of appropriation differs and is based on a particular appreciation of the objects for other intrinsic values besides the aesthetic. Díaz perceives and appreciates in each object a previous life, a value given by the “workmanship that he recognizes” and respects: the nixtamal stone stacked outside a mill—”how not to buy them, they have a precious value in form and function”—; the bracket recovered from an iron dump—”it must be a hundred years old, it is beautiful, it cannot be trash”—; the trunk that for more than ten years was on the terrace of the Tornel workshop—”I used to sit there to smoke”.

In a certain way, Rodolfo Díaz Cervantes is a chronicler of the ready-made, describing his raw material and, therefore, his pieces like someone who travels through a city with his anecdotes. And that is perhaps the most profound way in which this exhibition is autobiographical: each work is composed of pre-works of great value to the artist, of object-mementos that echo the warm and curious way in which RoDiCe travels through life.

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