Says Theodor W. Adorno in his Aesthetic Theory (1970), that “the beauty of nature is that it seems to say more than it is. The idea of art is more to your start this contingency, grab your aparencialidad […] The works of art become such to produce the most, to create its own transcendence. “That is, according to the German philosopher, those creations that manage to show the unreality of reality objectified cause a dreadful shiver, an unexplained confusion, as perceived -a our view to the figures and objects of the painter, draftsman and printmaker Aurelio Rodriguez.
It would be easy to commend his refined technique and prodigious drawing, more than enough skills to a virtuous academic complacent or stale; expertise, as is required, which employs unqualified Gallery of portraits with outstanding results. But its purpose goes further, he knows that art oscillates between perception and symbolism; intuits dozing on the threshold boundary between certainty and contingency. Therefore it needs the formal components, thus, from the tradition, convey sensory layer and into an intellectual, higher plane, where the image exceeds the purely visual and invokes notions suprarreales. Neither daunted by the chosen themes, because instead of adopting current or non-figurative abstract -idóneas processes or linguistically expressive renewal compositional variables questioned two “classics” of Western painting reasons: the female nude and, since 1990 and in particular, still life, studied and posed with unusual eloquence.
Conscious, therefore, the evocative power of figurative imagery, increases their illusionistic effects through a descriptive detail pushed to the limit of verisimilitude; I trompe increased even more, by linking with various currents that have distorted the reality of their mere mimetic function, such as hyper-realism, magical realism and even surreal drift. With two powers, Aurelio Rodriguez reaches its contradictory role: first, to attract, identify emotionally the viewer with the work, given its quality obvious thing and the natural human inclination toward the identifiable; but on the other hand, that first impression shorts with iconic anomalies of various types (unpredictable foreshortenings, daring perspectives, light gaps, matéricos contrasts, palpable atmosphere …) that cause an unconscious estrangement mixture of awe and mystery, therefore, in the background , that balance between the fleeting and stable fundamental virtue-and continue with the thesis of Adorno true works of art.
José Manuel Sanjuán, historian and art critic.
