Jorge Rodríguez Diez (R10)

Cayo Largo del Sur, from the series Ay qué delicia... Doña, 2011

Silkscreen on cardboard, 100 x 80 cm.


  • R10 is becoming one of the Cuban visual creators with more concern on the cultural memory of our so singular past. A visual archeologist with enough intellectual sensitivity to know how to recognize, in an image of the past, a cultural essence making it transcend the time and circumstance in which it was made.
  • R10, the name that identifies Jorge Rodríguez Diez in the field of graphic design, is an authorial signature that is also beginning to leave its mark in the plural scene of Cuban contemporary art.

[…] Jorge Rodríguez Diez (R10) is becoming one of the Cuban visual creators with more concern on the cultural memory of our so singular past. If there is a constant possible to identify in the main body of his artistic production is that of recycling retro visualities, not precisely coming from the world of art, but from other related fields like graphic design and its tributaries: commercial advertising and political propaganda. That is, Jorge looks at the cultural heritage of the past, but not at the images legitimated as artistic and which, therefore, enjoy today some cultural authority. R10 has become interested in another type of images, perhaps with a less eminent visuality, those scattered in innumerable magazines, newspapers or newspaper serials of the times, spontaneous, modest, everyday images, but an irrefutable testimony of the way in which the cultural imaginary and the aesthetic sensitivity of a people is expressed in a specific historical moment. […].

[…] It could be said that this popular visuality, growing moldy day by day on the paper and on the collective memory, has been one of the main raw materials in his creation and, therefore, I do not hesitate in defining him as a “visual archeologist”, that is, someone with enough intellectual sensitivity to know how to recognize, in an image of the past, a cultural essence making it transcend the time and circumstance in which it was made.

Now well, what is most important is that all this “archeological” work has no more purpose than talking, reflecting and problematizing on the present. Jorge’s poetics is very far from being historicist. His great rhetorical finding is to be able to discourse on very current problems using stylistic forms and images of the mediate and immediate past. […]. 1

 

1. Hamlet Fernández, “Notes about R10’s Visual Archeology,” Art Oncuba, no. 04, 2014.