Imran Peretta / Abel Rodríguez at the BALTIC
A week before my university shut, I excitedly booked my tickets to a preview of Abel Rodríguez’s exhibition at the BALTIC, Newcastle. On the night of the preview I was instead two-hundred miles away at my family home, and bedding down for weeks of social distancing. Luckily, the online world has taken on the challenges posed by a nation-wide lockdown, and this exhibition is now available on the BALTIC+ website. The shift to online exhibitions changes the way we approach and respond to them, and while we may not experience the same, irreplaceable sense of physical immersion into an artist’s world, we can still appreciate works by their colour, composition and intention.
Abel Rodríguez, The BALTIC. Rodríguez’s exhibition lends itself well to an online format, which highlights the two-dimensional property of his botanical paintings, initially intended for ecological research. Striking photos of the exhibition space show art mounted around the walls, and in the centre of the room a raw wooden frame holds more of his colourful and highly detailed paintings.
The photographs help to illustrate what may not have been as apparent at the bustling exhibition opening, which are the structured squares in the floor, exhibiting stand, and lighting, all creating an emphasis of the gallery as a staged space. This structured and simple set shows an awareness of what Rodríguez admits in Fernando Arias’ 2014 short film, another part of the exhibition, that each person measures his work in different ways, but Rodríguez’s role is to ‘simply draw images’. Having an invitingly cubic setting visually invites viewers to fill in the gaps and draw conclusions of their own. Rodríguez’s modesty about his work allows it to be independent of his own intention and a viewer’s preconceived notions; he names and identifies plants, but allows them to be receptive to any interpretation. When viewed through a computer screen, this is further emphasised through the private experience of seeing his work, there being no nods and smiles between viewers with a common agreement, but personal analysis must be just that: personal.
The paintings themselves continue to play with preconceived notions, as wide, flat expanses of colour suggest a naively held brush, and are contrasted with detailed mark-making on leaves and flowers. The viewer enters the exhibition with a mindset focused on ‘art’, and leaves with a respect for the simplicity with which Rodríguez captures the Amazonian setting. Continuous cool green tones on a stark white background lend his paintings to being exhibited together, as the simple tones of some paintings are echoed in the next. In this way, the digital format may lose that impact of being surrounded by these paintings. Repeating and slightly changing patterns of leaves, birds, and trees, the coarse physicality of paint on paper, are another aspect of his simple and organic representation. The portal of the screen once again isolates and flattens each work, not unlike a botanist might do, spreading a painting beside their specimens as references.
Rodríguez’s words again may help an impatient artist to free their conceptions of his work, saying ‘Time will come. When it comes, I get up.’ He waits for his ideas to form and only then does he act, he is passive and allows his surroundings to manipulate him. Likewise, when seeing his exhibition online, the viewer is forced to scroll through one photo after another, experiencing each in its own right before moving onto the next. In the physical gallery setting however, a crowd around one painting might detract the viewer, so an essential part of the experience of Rodríguez’s Amazonian representation is lost.
This online exhibition and Arias’ short film might take only one hour to see, but drive a new way of looking at art and, specifically, the nature of the Amazon forest. It is distanced and close, personal and scientific, and ultimately free for the individual to find a wholly personal meaning in it.
View the exhibition at: http://balticplus.uk/abel-rodriguez-e785/