The Nuevo León, Mexico-based gallery, GE Galeria, has officially opened it’s doors to New Yorkers. The new location is in the heart of the Lower East Side and is currently running a solo show, “God Complex (your father is dead)” featuring one of their most prominent artists, Victor Rodriguez.
The Mexico City-born, Brooklyn-based painter primarily works in acrylic on canvas to create his hyper-detailed and autobiographical, though not photo-realistic paintings. Since the beginning of his career, Rodriguez’s works were derived from haunting personal photographs of his ex-wife. These images would then be creatively filtered through the artist’s unpleasant memories to produce paintings ripe with metaphor and subjective impressions.
The neoteric show, “God Complex (your father is dead),” is a complete departure in both subject content and approach. Rodriguez’s art historical background has been a pivotal factor behind a majority of his inspiration. These new works are a modern spin on vanitas paintings – Northern European Baroque still-lifes from the 16th and 17th century that explored themes of mortality.
With the current show, Rodriguez has juxtaposed skulls with old telephones and other pop-culture references to comment on his own life trajectory. Through this series, Rodriguez aims to confront his traumatic relationship with his father, as well as comment on universal themes like the passage of life and the inevitability of death.
The exhibition also include works from his ADHD series, which comment on the struggles of a younger, media saturated generation. (Rodriguez first came up with the idea for this series while observing his 17-year old daughter watch television and text simultaneously.) He sought to create paintings that could be immediately comprehended, both teasing and catering to a demographic that has been conditioned to skim and scroll. By combining broken-down and unused photographs, he mix and matched images until he found a particular aesthetic. This series is bold and vibrant, universally captivating to the eye.
Rodriguez has previously been featured at the Scope Art Fair in New York (2011) and the Mid-career Retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Monterrey (2009). To see more of his works check out his Instagram or his flickr webpage.
Like this article? Check out Rachel Rossin’s virtual reality still-life paintings, or other great art currently on view in New York.
