Perentorio
- 2023 -
The sinister flowers of goodness
Innocent plants and animals are far from humans. They are prolific and fertile. These life forms coexist closely. They include petals, feathers, algae, legs, fungi, beaks, lichens, eyes, corals, roots, hair, berries, flowers, and wool. They give shape to beings that surprise us with the insolence of their colours. These beings compose a paradise that stealthily approaches the sinister. They bloom or explode in the everyday to break the order of the known, of the named. Cellular animism, uncontrolled explosion of life that seems to stroll on the brink of death.
They are timeless, impossible still lifes. We see flowers, fruits, and algae summoned to an imprecise time and place. Different seasons and climates are represented. There is abundance and fertility. Everything germinates, invades, and amalgamates. Each object is real. Sometimes each part exists in nature. When they coexist, when they come together in whimsical juxtapositions, they evoke a variegated, dreamlike, disjointed universe. Any element can mix with another, such as a tree or a mushroom. It can be a toad, a bird, or some lichens. These combinations occur to camouflage themselves or to give way to circumstantial hybrids.
The world will continue to evolve despite the ecological disaster. Life is stubborn, and man is only a way station. The mechanisms that have created the biological variety of the world are still active. At this moment, mutations and changes are occurring. They are indifferent to man’s excesses. Mother earth will continue to live. This is true even if man is obstinate in his desire to disappear.
The alpha male lies surrounded by lush flowers and fruits. It is the skull of a stag crowned with antlers. It rests between phallic blossoms and open female fruits. A haunting magenta smoke leaves an apocalyptic note in paradise. These are images of central composition and light, eyes without eyelids, which face the receiver without concessions.
Lau Rodríguez has a great mastery of scale. There is harmony between the size of the brushstroke and the size of the work. The composition can be tiny or large. There is an intricate and constant mixture dominated by the animal and the vegetable. In contrast to the idea of man as the rational centre of creation, there is a fracture. Man was thought to have the power of free will. There is imperfection, the exuberance of weakness, and the dream. There is the fabric of the living, the continuity of other forms of life grafted, and diluted in the environment. Flowers can be algae, lichens can be hair, legs can be roots, wool can be grass, feathers can be leaves. In each scene, the sinister flutters like a vampire. It is that which makes reality suspicious. The extraordinary beings break the logical unity of the named object. There are juxtapositions. There are anomalous encounters and the detached parts.
There is a network of causal, logical relations that protects us. It shapes our home. This network is broken with the appearance of the unnamable hybrid. The repressed primitive returns. This marks the emergence of the natural that ignores the strict categories we have imposed on it. It shows the uncontrolled abundance of unforeseen links. In contrast to the symbolic, which unites in a body, the diabolic appears. It separates and disintegrates. It undergoes the metamorphoses of the natural. The animism emerges with prodigality as an accumulation of leafy, fragmentary beings.
Lau Rodríguez’s work, from a post-apocalyptic disenchantment, is inscribed in a complex and attractive figure. It draws the position of the woman in front of the world. This position is nourished by posthumanism. It is understood as a humanism that has abandoned the centrality around man. Instead, it concentrates and extends itself to all living beings. This work is supported by ecology and the humble posture of belonging to nature.
Gabriel Rodriguez – Text for the exhibition in Siboney Gallery
