lggy Rodriguez holds third solo show 'Genuflect' at Kanto Gallery

Iggy Rodriguez' third solo show, Genuflect runs from May 5 to 29, 2012 at Kanto Artists Run Space, The Collective, 7274 Malugay St. Brgy San Antonio Village, Makati City. 

 

Kneeling before the gods 

 

The act of genuflection is a popular gesture among a people repeatedly conquered by the cross and the sword, implying not only reverence for the object of one’s worship but also obedience to the Word of one’s Lords. It has become an act signifying ritualized subservience: briefly lowered on bended knee as a curtsy to the gods of religion, colonization and capital. 

 

In his third solo exhibition, Cultural Center of the Philippines 2009 Thirteen Artists awardee Raoul Ignacio Rodriguez reflects on these unconscious acts of submission to the system. He constructs an altarpiece paying homage to modern-day distress, surrounded by a suite of pen and ink portraits. He constructs social commentaries by using images from both institutionalized religion and secular forms of exploitation to embellish and define his works. 

The ritual of genuflection is implied and never directly represented here. Instead, the gallery space becomes a site for worship: a chapel of contemporary crisis where reverence is washed away by the horror of reality. What is new about this exhibition is Rodriguez’s more conscious attempt to produce installation art – a medium which he started exploring in 2004 in collaboration with the artist group UGAT-Lahi. 

 

The show’s central work is a wooden altar filled with found statuary: a triumvirate of small resin santos discarded and left in the trash outside a Church in Manila. These dismembered images of the Christ Child hardly inspire any reverence in their current state of dishevelment: naked, nicked and surrounded by smaller plastic icons denoting the violence of militarism and capital in today’s milieu. 

 

Rodriguez constructs the altarpiece as a piece of artifice, filled with icons resurrected from the refuse of the world and embellished with the signs of simmering trouble. Stationed on a pedestal, the work invites the viewer to participate in the fatal act of worshipping fallen idols. This central piece is surrounded by a suite of drawings on ballpoint pen and ink on paper. This is a medium that Rodriguez has repeatedly wielded with mastery and ease, as demonstrated in his winning the Art Association of the Philippines Grand Prize for the pen and ink drawing category back in 2001. 

 

Like his paintings, Rodriguez’s portraits demonstrate a careful rendering of form and details, managing to capture the changing textures and images of impoverishment. His portraits of excruciation were produced using an equally painstaking process: using ordinary ballpoint pens, he coaxes out line after line until new forms emerge on paper. Such drawings consistently comprised his so-called “visual journals” kept over the years and chronicled stories of the dispossessed and the exploited in Philippine society. 

 

In this show, Rodriguez creates a collection of drawings representing man as the crucified Christ: hybrid cyborgs crowned with thorns and torn apart by cables, set in whitewashed frames fashioned from prefabricated wood trimmings. A reference to the retablos or devotional paintings replete in churches, the works source their iconography not only from Christian tradition but also from everyday life, demonstrating how the hereafter and hell can both coexist in today’s reality. 

 

All in all, the works and the exhibition space critique the little godless acts of genuflection in everyday life, quietly inciting the viewer to recoil from these rituals of powerlessness and obeisance. - Lisa Ito 

 

Since 1994, Iggy Rodriguez’s artistic energies have been channelled into visual journals and communal projects: effigies, street murals, collaborative paintings and grassroots exhibitions. Since 2004, he started to explore media as performance and installation art. His commitment to critical art plays a dynamic role in his artistic practice. Being a full-time cultural activist compels him to create on transportable formats: such as sketchbooks and small-scale canvases or paper that can be transferred from place to place. His studio is wherever the struggle to ‘serve the people’ takes him: picket lines, urban poor and peasant communities, churches.

 

Press release and photo from Kanto Artists Run Space