NEW YORK, NY –– January 3rd , 2022 –– Kathryn Markel is pleased to present Counterpoint, by Rocío Rodríguez. This marks the artist’s third solo exhibition with Kathryn Markel Fine Arts.
This group of 14 paintings by Rocío Rodríguez, completed in 2021, are remarkably scaled down. The 11x14 inch, 12x12 inch, and the largest, 30x36 inch, paintings deliver the same weight and monumental vignettes as Rodríguez's pre-pandemic, larger than life, canvases.
Rodriguez continues with her visual language of characters moving in dialogue, a messy diary per se. The pictorial space inhabits movement, projection, and gesture, like the smudgy square, or the blurry suspended wire that's been struck and left to vibrate; it moves and leaves a trail of motion.
The implication is, nothing stops moving. Each player confers with the other, offering point and counterpoint, like the impromptu call and response between smudges and opacity, erasure and clarity. The forms, however vague or unstable by themselves, collectively achieve balance in that no one form reigns. The unfolding is a build up, or an escalation, not necessarily a story, but definitely an ask of, what happens next?
Rocío Rodríguez’s work is in numerous national and international private and public collections among them the High Museum of Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and the Huntsville Museum of Art. Ms. Rodríguez is the recipient of various national and regional awards among them Anonymous Was a Woman Award 2018, Artadia Atlanta 2011, a Cintas Fellowship, and two SAF/NEA Fellowships. In 2014 she was awarded an Artist Residency at the Marfa Contemporary in Marfa, Texas. Rocío Rodríguez was born in Caibarién, Cuba. She earned her BFA and MFA from the University of Georgia and continues to live and work in Atlanta, Georgia
