Alfredo Rodríguez

With “Body Building,” Alfredo Rodríguez continues his long-standing photographic exploration of the human form. This exhibition contains two types of work. First, torn photographs of what look like limbs, muscles, and joints are adhered to panels of wood and coated in a highly protective, hard matte resin to create large-scale collages. The delicate, crystal-like reflective surfaces from previous exhibitions, such as “Limbo” (2016), are nowhere to be found here. Instead, one observes the artist’s investigation into how fragile materials such as paper and processes such as silver gelatin can be enlisted to evoke the heft and power of a body.

For the second type of work on view, Rodríguez continues to experiment with sculptural pieces for which he applies photographs to the surfaces of vases. These images, echoing those in the collages, have been enlarged, overexposed, and subjected to other distortions by means of the photographic process. Whereas in earlier exhibitions Rodríguez used a wide spectrum of evocative colors—moody and washed-out oranges, pinks, blues, and greens—the compositions in “Body Building” form discombobulated black-and-white anatomies, yielding a distinctive aesthetic that seems to belong outside of time. Some of the vases are stacked and bound to each other, as if connected by ligaments. These sculptures induce bodily articulations—knees, elbows, or ankles—both familiar and strange, and produce a compelling dialectic between container and content, inner hollowness and surface skin.

Translated from Spanish by Jane Brodie.