Jorge Rodríguez Diez (R10)

Mom, from the series Ay qué delicia... Doña, 2011

Silkscreen on cardboard, 100 x 80 cm.


  • From the stylistic point of view, the unprejudiced repertoire of disparate figures of speech that turns to any visualization that favors the idea with wit. Innumerable metaphors and metonymies.
  • During the 2000s, R10 became one of our most brilliant designers, one who managed a style from design itself, without needing other more “beautifully artistic” crutches: the strange combination between his German cultural learning, addicted to order, geometry and the most Spartan austerity, and his essential Cuban character, addicted to boldness.
  • R10’s “artistic” works (were the former sporty?) have clearly political, ethical connotations. Jorge does not play the fool. His ideas take part in the group of uncertainties that make the life and mind of Cubans right this minute.

[…] 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. His works, therefore, are texts on which various historical horizons are superimposed, and this superimposition should be productively conciliated, in interpretative terms, in the moment of reception. That is why his art is demanding. It requires fairly informed receivers, capable of acknowledging, first of all, the cultural referents being recycled, parodied or manipulated, to be able to enjoy the intellectual subtleties intrinsic to that creative process. The great paradox, what disconcerts many, is that R10’s visual texts are more than contemporary –I would say that to a large extent experimental– and very novel from the aesthetic point of view. First, because of the way of structuring the visual discourse, a phase in which Jorge puts all his arsenal of designer skills, techniques and trade, in movement. It is almost impossible to object something in terms of composition, balance of forms, contrasts, expressive use of color, power of synthesis, articulation between text and image, and so on […]. 1

 

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