Jorge Rodríguez Diez (R10)

[…] In one of the artworks, a little Lada car faces immense darkness –the effect between background and figure does not allow finding out if it is a wall or pure absence of light–; but both its headlights are enough to light only a small portion of the darkness. Above, the enthusiastic advertising slogan assures us: Un mundo por delante (A world ahead); a little higher up, in Cyrillic characters, the details of the product. The visual composition cannot be more minimal; R10 dispenses with the excesses, only what is necessary: the iconic sign, the struggle between light and darkness, the ideological promise, and the identity of the Soviet brand. However, what could look like an advertising message characteristically charged with ideological manipulation and rhetorical seduction, is on the contrary a self-reflective message, as far as its own semiotic organization allows to be activated by the receiver according to the deconstruction of the ideological rhetoric that floats on the denotative surface. What is the world we have ahead of us: the small portion of light a Lada is able to project towards that future, dark and unknown? –uneasy receivers could very well ask themselves. In this artwork the creator manages to reduce a complex and fundamental question to the minimum: over what past, with what ambitions, and from what perspective (here the cultural issue in a broad sense comes in, including ethical, ideological, political and theoretical issues) do we rush into building a future project? I think Un mundo por delante sums up in a shrewd, clean and elegant gesture, an idea expressed in the catalogue for this exhibition: «The study of the past and its persistence in the collective memory of several generations, its revision and confrontation with the social experience of the present, and even more, its projection towards an evasive future, constitute the conceptual platform that supports the Los pasos perdidos (The lost steps) series by R10» […]. ¹

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