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GUILLERMO RODRÍGUEZ
The Signs of the Thistle

Guillermo Rodriguez’s sculpture work is solidly structured from the very beginning as it is intimately linked to the Northwest of Argentina and that unfathomable part of America that many refer to with good intentions but only the few manage to translate into memorable work, of outstanding formal beauty and rigor, not just in the conceptual but in the ideological. The latter, deserving much praise in him, as he manages to sail through the ambiguity of opposing symbolic universes without complying to the visual form that colonized the indigenous world nor compromising with the syncretic coquetries that are often mean as they legitimize a denomination by allowing secondary elements to be inserted in work that has quite a clear semantic nucleus and the formal aspects of which, have almost nothing to do with the dominated aesthetic. Rodriguez begins with wood, but also incorporates ceramic and paint. The wood usually defines the basic structure but for the most part, it is not just any wood, it is “cardon”, even more meaningful to the peoples of the mountainous land, heirs of the ancient cultures. Its deep streaks, resemble the wounds through which the earth breathes its ever changing agony. Rodriguez does not fall prey to the naturalism that has obsessed the western world throughout its history moreover, he understands that there cannot be strong ties in cultural tradition without representation. The use of paint leads him down the path of abstract decorativism, of sober features charged with symbolic intentions which sometimes play a contradictory part ion relation to the more dominant aspects of the art. Thus, a female figure that could evoke a Christian virgin has tribal tattoos on its body and a face that recalls terracotta. More than a virgin, it is a woman, a symbol of fruitfulness; a younger and more beautiful Pachamama or another force of nature. Instead of embracing the indigenous within the Christian as was done by so many colonizers and their local accomplices, the artist has decided to take pity on the old imagery, inherited from the Colonies, and has condescendingly given it a small place within the conceptual structure because, after all, it has significant meaning for the humble.

By Adolfo Colombres