Jorge Rodríguez Diez (R10)

[…] R10’s creative strategy is, before all, cognitive and has been able to crystalize in a very remarkable, novel and increasingly sophisticated visuality in semiotic terms. This line of work began with Los pasos perdidos (The lost steps, 2011), a series exploiting an imaginary perhaps not sufficiently visited by our artists, as were the political symbols and propaganda graphics of Soviet communist ideology, which in Cuba had its socialist version in the seventies and eighties of the last century. In three of the works in this series the main characters are: Lenin, the highest political symbol of the Russian revolution (Do Not Expose to Direct Sunlight); a Lada car, the symbol of communist industry, or at least the most popular for Cubans (Un mundo por delante – A world ahead of us), and the Sputnik, the great symbol of the beginning of the space era and, therefore, of Soviet science (We Can’t Be Wrong Again). In these works, Jorge parodies the aesthetic breath of the ideological propaganda of Soviet communism, their triumphalist slogans, their coarse demagogy, their utopian naiveté, and achieves something extremely difficult from the rhetoric point of view: these pieces function at the same time as a sham of propaganda graphics and, also, as self-subversion, ideological unmasking and critical deconstruction of this type of discourse, which still has strong remnants in Cuba […].

[…] For its part, the word Sputnik is almost out of the frame, as if launched into the space, while the text in English (as a slogan), while alluding the fall of that first satellite, becomes an imperative of the present: how long will we continue mistaking the path? As can be inferred from the shallow analysis of these two works, it is a discourse interrogating and questioning the present, but for that purpose it refers to the origin or the deepest causes of a given state of things […]. ¹

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