Jorge Rodríguez Diez (R10)

A Post Apocalyptic Affair, from the series Ay qué delicia... Doña, 2011

Silkscreen on cardboard, 100 x 80 cm.


  • ¿Cómo hacer hablar a una estética del pasado sobre nuestro presente histórico? O más bien, ¿cómo hablar desde una estética del pasado, sobre ciertas peculiaridades del presente insular? Ese es el reto creativo que se ha impuesto R10 en esta serie; y los resultados son alentadores.
  • R10 se va convirtiendo en uno de los creadores visuales cubanos más preocupados por la memoria cultural de nuestro tan singular pasado.
  • La operatoria creativa de R10 en la que el desempolvamiento de cierta memoria cultural no se da simplemente a nivel temático, o anecdótico, como en tanto seudoarte nostálgico que suele verse por ahí; la estrategia creativa de R10 es antes que todo cognoscitiva, y ha logrado ir cristalizando en una visualidad muy singular, novedosa, y cada vez más sofisticada en términos semióticos.

The artworks grouped in the series Ay qué delicia… Doña (Oh!What a delight… Ma’am!) were exhibited in the acclaimed R10’s solo show with the same title at the art gallery of Rubén Martínez Villena Library, from December 2011 to January 2012. Referring to the impact of this series on the current art scene in the Island, the art critic Hamlet Fernández pointed out:

[…] In the series Ay qué delicia…Doña (Oh! What a delight… Ma’am!), the object of recycling is the Cuban commercial advertising of the fifties. Jorge turns to a new visual style that is practically unknown to the post-Revolution generations –a visual style that constitutes the tropical version of the aesthetics of abundance in the postwar period that the United States exports. R10’s recycled posters abound in beautiful, very slender, smiling, provocative, sensual women; it is the world of glamour, pleasure, hedonism and full satisfaction, but all of this is seasoned with very autochthonous ingredients like cunning, flirting, ambivalence and a certain callow-people naivety. However, I think the intention is not parodic this time; here the appropriation is sustained by a much more complex and subtler intellectual operation than mere parody. How to make an aesthetic of the past speak about our historical present? Or rather, how to speak from an aesthetic of the past about certain peculiarities of the insular present? That is, to my mind, the creative challenge R10 has imposed upon himself in this series; and the outcome is encouraging.

These are beautiful, elegant artworks, with great visual cleanness, which invite a conceptual game based on a flirting of subtleties that is necessary to trace in the color, the backgrounds, the phrases, the gestures, all in all, in the entire sign textuality, which in some cases is still very minimalist […]. 1

 

1. Hamlet Fernández, “The simulacrum-poster by R10: more than a matter of attitude,” Artecubano, no. 2, 2011.