Projeto de Exposições : “Cartografías Para Um Futuro Incerto” / “Soluções Alternativas para um Futuro Incerto”
Alternative Solutions for an Uncertain Future
Soluções Alternativas para um Futuro Incerto
Paço Imperial - from Rio de Janeiro / Paço Imperial – Rio de Janeiro
23/11/2022 to 23/02/2023
Alternative Solutions for an Uncertain Future – 2016-2023
“In this study, I am seeking a ‘bricolage’ of elements that in one way or another symbolize, describe and convey a force of nature through a poetic and contemporary language of art.”
Jorge Rodríguez-Aguilar
Soluções Alternativas Para Um Futuro Incerto - 2016 - 20123
“Nesta pesquisa, procuro uma ‘bricolagem’ de elementos que de uma forma ou de outra simbolizam, descrevam e transmitam a força da natureza por meio de uma linguagem poética e contemporânea da arte.”
Jorge Rodríguez-Aguilar
Plastic plants, natural plants, metal and steel cable Various dimensions Year: 2015/2022 Set of plastic plants, including “Snake Plant”, “Rue”, “Dumb Cane”, and other plants commonly seen as protectors against negative energies and evil eye.
Plastic plants, natural plants, metal and steel cable Various dimensions Year: 2015/2022 Set of plastic plants, including “Snake Plant”, “Rue”, “Dumb Cane”, and other plants commonly seen as protectors against negative energies and evil eye.
Plastic plants, natural plants, metal and steel cable Various dimensions Year: 2015/2022 Set of plastic plants, including “Snake Plant”, “Rue”, “Dumb Cane”, and other plants commonly seen as protectors against negative energies and evil eye.
Plastic plants, natural plants, metal and steel cable Various dimensions Year: 2015/2022 Set of plastic plants, including “Snake Plant”, “Rue”, “Dumb Cane”, and other plants commonly seen as protectors against negative energies and evil eye.
Plastic plants, natural plants, metal and steel cable Various dimensions Year: 2015/2022 Set of plastic plants, including “Snake Plant”, “Rue”, “Dumb Cane”, and other plants commonly seen as protectors against negative energies and evil eye.
Plastic plants, natural plants, metal and steel cable Various dimensions Year: 2015/2022 Set of plastic plants, including “Snake Plant”, “Rue”, “Dumb Cane”, and other plants commonly seen as protectors against negative energies and evil eye.
Discarded wood and steel cable Various dimensions Year: 2015/2022 Set of eleven “trees” of various sizes. These sculptures emerge from the discovery of 11 pieces of a tree of Amazonian origin called Pau Mulato, measuring roughly 15 metres in height. The branches of the original tree are transformed into a kind of fork coupled to the crown of the new trees like slingshots at the ready to be engaged in defence.
Discarded wood and steel cable Various dimensions Year: 2015/2022 Set of eleven “trees” of various sizes. These sculptures emerge from the discovery of 11 pieces of a tree of Amazonian origin called Pau Mulato, measuring roughly 15 metres in height. The branches of the original tree are transformed into a kind of fork coupled to the crown of the new trees like slingshots at the ready to be engaged in defence.
Discarded wood and steel cable Various dimensions Year: 2015/2022 Set of eleven “trees” of various sizes. These sculptures emerge from the discovery of 11 pieces of a tree of Amazonian origin called Pau Mulato, measuring roughly 15 metres in height. The branches of the original tree are transformed into a kind of fork coupled to the crown of the new trees like slingshots at the ready to be engaged in defence.
Discarded wood and steel cable Various dimensions Year: 2015/2022 Set of eleven “trees” of various sizes. These sculptures emerge from the discovery of 11 pieces of a tree of Amazonian origin called Pau Mulato, measuring roughly 15 metres in height. The branches of the original tree are transformed into a kind of fork coupled to the crown of the new trees like slingshots at the ready to be engaged in defence.
Discarded wood and steel cable Various dimensions Year: 2015/2022 Set of eleven “trees” of various sizes. These sculptures emerge from the discovery of 11 pieces of a tree of Amazonian origin called Pau Mulato, measuring roughly 15 metres in height. The branches of the original tree are transformed into a kind of fork coupled to the crown of the new trees like slingshots at the ready to be engaged in defence.
Discarded wood and steel cable Various dimensions Year: 2015/2022 Set of eleven “trees” of various sizes. These sculptures emerge from the discovery of 11 pieces of a tree of Amazonian origin called Pau Mulato, measuring roughly 15 metres in height. The branches of the original tree are transformed into a kind of fork coupled to the crown of the new trees like slingshots at the ready to be engaged in defence.
Wood, iron and various materials 2015/2022
Wood, iron and various materials 2015/2022
Wood, iron and various materials 2015/2022
Iron, wood and various materials Various dimensions Year: 2015/2022 Consisting of nine sets of metal hooks that hold various elements created by the artist as visual, tactile and audible “amulets”, which alert us about and request protection against deforestation and its devastating effects.
Iron, wood and various materials Various dimensions Year: 2015/2022 Consisting of nine sets of metal hooks that hold various elements created by the artist as visual, tactile and audible “amulets”, which alert us about and request protection against deforestation and its devastating effects.
Iron, wood and various materials Various dimensions Year: 2015/2022 Consisting of nine sets of metal hooks that hold various elements created by the artist as visual, tactile and audible “amulets”, which alert us about and request protection against deforestation and its devastating effects.
Iron, wood and various materials Various dimensions Year: 2015/2022 Consisting of nine sets of metal hooks that hold various elements created by the artist as visual, tactile and audible “amulets”, which alert us about and request protection against deforestation and its devastating effects.
Iron, wood and various materials Various dimensions Year: 2015/2022 Consisting of nine sets of metal hooks that hold various elements created by the artist as visual, tactile and audible “amulets”, which alert us about and request protection against deforestation and its devastating effects.
Iron, wood and various materials Various dimensions Year: 2015/2022 Consisting of nine sets of metal hooks that hold various elements created by the artist as visual, tactile and audible “amulets”, which alert us about and request protection against deforestation and its devastating effects.
Wood, steel cable, rock salt, rice and graphene Various dimensions Year: 2022 Reinterpretation of a set of seven wooden troughs for feeding cattle that are suspended, filled with rock salt or raw rice. Two elements used in various cultures to ward off negative energies and evil spirits. Once the troughs had been prepared, their shape suggested a mutation into “trough-canoes”, bringing renewed hope; despite the adversities, the boat moves forward...
Wood, steel cable, rock salt, rice and graphene Various dimensions Year: 2022 Reinterpretation of a set of seven wooden troughs for feeding cattle that are suspended, filled with rock salt or raw rice. Two elements used in various cultures to ward off negative energies and evil spirits. Once the troughs had been prepared, their shape suggested a mutation into “trough-canoes”, bringing renewed hope; despite the adversities, the boat moves forward...
Wood, steel cable, rock salt, rice and graphene Various dimensions Year: 2022 Reinterpretation of a set of seven wooden troughs for feeding cattle that are suspended, filled with rock salt or raw rice. Two elements used in various cultures to ward off negative energies and evil spirits. Once the troughs had been prepared, their shape suggested a mutation into “trough-canoes”, bringing renewed hope; despite the adversities, the boat moves forward...
Wood, steel cable, rock salt, rice and graphene Various dimensions Year: 2022 Reinterpretation of a set of seven wooden troughs for feeding cattle that are suspended, filled with rock salt or raw rice. Two elements used in various cultures to ward off negative energies and evil spirits. Once the troughs had been prepared, their shape suggested a mutation into “trough-canoes”, bringing renewed hope; despite the adversities, the boat moves forward...
Wood, steel cable, rock salt, rice and graphene Various dimensions Year: 2022 Reinterpretation of a set of seven wooden troughs for feeding cattle that are suspended, filled with rock salt or raw rice. Two elements used in various cultures to ward off negative energies and evil spirits. Once the troughs had been prepared, their shape suggested a mutation into “trough-canoes”, bringing renewed hope; despite the adversities, the boat moves forward...
Jorge Rodríguez-Aguilar’s exhibition ‘Alternative Solutions for an Uncertain Future’ presented at the Paço Imperial in Rio de Janeiro in November 2022, bears in its title a provocation and reflection on the current times and the regenerative power of art.
Recovering art’s symbolic power and re-establishing its relations of spatial magnetism, the artist presents four new installations for visitors to walk through and touch.
The artist deals with images and forms that not only broach questions of Latin American ritualistic practices, merging elements of indigenous, African and European knowledge, but also speak to the actual condition of the colonial appropriation which characterized the exploitation of nature through agricultural activities. Jorge, therefore, works with appropriated and recycled wood and metal which transmute into sculptures, pointing to this colonial and industrial past. In his narrative, he also uses symbolic objects collected from popular religious artefact markets.
The Afro-Brazilian “balangandãs”, for example, inspire the “pendants”, and are reproduced in large-scale, gaining new meanings.
The plants of a magical-religious nature are hanging in the exhibition space and subjected to the artist’s ironic touch, using plastic models to present them in an artificial and unusual fashion.
Walking among the pieces recreates the movement of a body partaking in a ritual.
In Jorge Rodríguez-Aguilar’s oeuvre, we not only observe an awareness of the place of fetishized elements and cultural images, but also subliminally perceive the metaphors related to the actual circulation of products in colonized countries, which products originate from cattle and crop farming.
We are, therefore, faced now with situations of the soul, with the worship and ritualization of fragmented elements of nature, like horns, plants and salt, and now with urban elements, like drains that become rattles, or plastic plants made in China.
The studies conducted by this Colombian-born artist who has lived in Brazil since 1998 eminently address the African diaspora, so strongly present in the Colombian Caribbean, as well as the Caribbean exchanges themselves which can be compared to rituals like those of Cuban Santeria, Brazilian Candomblé and Haitian Voodoo.
Jorge captures and demonstrates that Colombia, Venezuela, Cuba, Africa and Brazil are transversally connected, whereby the exchanges of beliefs and rituals incorporated and reinterpreted amid a strong Christianity. He thus leaves us images and objects of multicultural circulation, which are redefined and reinvented through art.”
Marcelo Campos
A exposição “Soluções Alternativas para um Futuro Incerto” do artista Jorge Rodríguez-Aguilar apresentada no Paço Imperial do Rio de Janeiro em novembro de 2022, traz no seu título uma provocação e uma reflexão sobre os tempos atuais e o poder regenerador da arte. Reinvestindo a arte do seu poder simbólico e de suas relações de imantação do espaço, o artista apresenta quatro instalações inéditas que podem ser percorridas e tocadas pelo espectador.
O artista lida com imagens e formas que trazem tanto questões das práticas ritualísticas latino-americanas, misturando saberes indígenas, africanos e europeus, quanto a própria condição da apropriação colonial que marcou a exploração da natureza através das práticas agrícolas. Jorge passa, então, a trabalhar com madeiras e metais apropriados e reutilizados que se transmutam para esculturas, como indícios desse passado colonial e industrial. Em sua narrativa, o artista utiliza-se também de objetos simbólicos coletados em mercados populares de artigos religiosos.
Os “balangandãs” afro-brasileiros, por exemplo, inspiram os “penduricalhos” e ganham um grande formato e outros significados.
As plantas de cunho mágico-religioso são suspensas em meio do espaço expositivo e submetidas a ironia do artista ao apresentá-las de modo artificial e inusitado, através de modelos confeccionados em plástico.
A circulação entre as obras nos coloca em movimento como um corpo em processo ritual.
No conjunto das obras de Jorge Rodríguez-Aguilar, percebemos tanto a consciência do lugar de fetichização de elementos e imagens culturais, como também percebemos subliminarmente as metáforas que se relacionam com a própria circulação de produtos em países colonizados, produtos esses advindos da produção agropecuária. Dessa forma, ora estamos diante de situações anímicas, da adoração e ritualização de elementos da natureza, colocados em partes, como chifres, plantas e sal, e ora de outro modo, diante de elementos urbanos, como ralos, que viram chocalhos e ou plantas de plástico produzidas na China.
As pesquisas do artista, nascido na Colômbia, e radicado no Brasil desde 1998, trata eminentemente das diásporas africanas, muito fortes no Pacífico e Caribe Colombiano, além das próprias trocas caribenhas que se aproximam de rituais como os da santeria cubana, o candomblé brasileiro e o vodu haitiano. Jorge capta e explicita que Colômbia, Venezuela, Cuba, África e Brasil se ligam por esta transversalidade, as trocas de crenças e rituais incorporadas e reinterpretadas no meio de uma forte cristandade. Deixa-nos assim, imagens e objetos de circulação multiculturais que são ressignificados e reinventados através da arte.”
Marcelo Campos