ARTIST BIO

Kikito Rodríguez, is a Dominican multidisciplinary artist based in New York, for more than three decades, born in Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic (1963). Rodríguez studied drawing in Modern School, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic in 1978, and from 1982 to 1985, participated in workshops of drawings, paintings, engraving, stained glass, graphic design, and photography. The school in which these workshops were based in The School of Design Altos de Chavón. He graduated in Fine Arts and Illustration at The School of Design Altos de Chavón, La Romana, Dominican Republic, Affiliated to Parsons-The New School in New York, (1988). He later moved to the United States where he kept working between New York and California, Rodriguez, began to adopt an interdisciplinary approach to his creative practice, combining different techniques, working with wood, photography, silkscreen printing, recycling, and digital media. After two years he in Florida where he continued to enrich his artistic language and later returned to New York, where he began to create pictorial works in mixed media. Rodríguez used canvas to create an unusual flow of images, atmospheres, allusions and metamorphic chromatic spaces that provoke surprises, restlessness and perplexity all at the same time. This leads us to perceive a vertiginous imaginary torrent that impacts an extraordinary evocative capacity.

 

In this process Rodriguez, refer us to rebellion, the energetic, symbolic, spiritual, ideological, utopian and unspeakable beauty of tempering. It is a painting released from the background-shape dichotomy, where the artist proceeds by preventing objectivity and technique from dominating the creative act; repudiating all attempts at representation and eluding the logical reflections that can enforce the purity of the work.

 

His works have been exhibited successfully in important galleries, museums, cultural centers and contemporary art fairs in the United States, Argentina and Dominican Republic. Rodríguez’s art has been published in a journal, newspapers and magazine.

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ARTIST STATEMENT

The work that I have been accumulating led me to study the shapes of the clouds through different artistic expressions, including painting. As I developed this experiment beyond the abstract images, the clouds interested me as a source of analogy between their moods and their literary interpretations. The magic of its metamorphosis became an obsession with the observation of light, darkness, movement, and everything that they transform.

 

 In my works I transmute concepts of Abstract Expressionism, Lyric Abstraction and Informalism art, attacking the pictorial act from attitude and matter as absolute action, giving an importance to the resources of intuition, accident, vitality of the expressive aspect, the suggestive capacity of the surface and the automatism to transmit the energy of the gesture when I attack the blank canvas, at the same time that I assimilate the way to accentuate the vaporous chromatic fields alternating and fusing the blue, red, green, yellow, gray, black, white and violet, that reinforces the expressive intensity and the sensation of restlessness emanating from the surfaces. The issues and substances that often involve my pieces are the emotion, the Cosmos, the movement, the knowledge, the mysticism, the time and the elements of nature.

 

As an artist, I have preferred to approach this subject through an intuitively abstract language, since intuition and abstraction offer me the best tools to express myself with greater freedom and emotion. In this production, I use cold and warm colors with their respective complementary to create contrasts and compositions where the perspectives stand out for their protagonist in each of the paintings with nervous gestures, volatile brushstrokes, the expansive stain, and the medium's liquidity, putting action into the resources of automatism, imaginative thinking and irrational expressionism to speak with sublime eloquence of creative freedom, cosmic infinity, the celebration of the existential moment. The references that I acquire are from the Japanese artists Jiro Yoshihara, Sadamasa Motonaga, Kasuo Shiraga and Shoso Shimamoto, founders of the groups "Zero-Kai" and "Gutai", in the middle of the 20th century.

 

 With this language, I hope that the viewers will have the freedom to imagine or dream about the environment in which suns, moons, earth, water, and other phenomena are condensed and danced in inhospitable landscapes; issues and facets that enrich the critical reality about global warming, calling for the urgency of a moment of reflection for the quality of life on the planet.

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Kikito  Rodríguez

Yonkers, NY, USA

kikitorodriguez,com