Freddy Rodríguez’ body of work is an extraordinary example of the continuing vitality of the art of painting. Born 1945 in Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic, Rodríguez received his artistic training in New York City, where his schools ranged from the Metropolitan Museum to the Art Students League, and his teachers’ were Rembrandt, Cézanne and Mondrian. Abstract Expressionism, Pop and Minimalism were the reigning stylistic proposals then, and Rodríguez learned from them, absorbing the authentic and discarding the faddish. By the 1970s he was already a painter with something to say, and whatever his conceptual concerns have been since then, these are always tied together by his obsession with painting.

Rodríguez, like his cultural hero the writer Julio Cortázar, has never been a prisoner of style. On the contrary, like the late and very international Argentinean, he questions the very form of his work. “Style” is something to discover/encounter through hard work and harder thinking, explored to the point of exhausting it, and then discarded. Therefore, when we look back at his body of work we encounter exploration of Pre-Columbian identity in large geometric paintings, eroticism in colorful organic abstractions, symbols of daily life in vigorous brushwork, the brutal conquest and encounter of cultures in the Caribbean or the presence of a dictator in a radically new visual vocabulary that synthesizes geometric and organic abstraction. His subjects and concerns range from sexual oppression in the Catholic Church to the very nature of abstraction and its politics for an artist from the Third World. All this done within the tradition of Western painting; a tradition which he enhances and expands through a critical questioning. I believe that Freddy Rodríguez is one of maybe twenty odd painters (Rochelle Fein stein, William T. Williams being two others) that continue to make painting vital in contemporary art. Just as I have enjoyed encountering his pictorial achievements of the past three and a half decades, I look forward to the adventures in painting to come.

Alejandro Anreus, PhD
Professor of Art History and Latin American/Latino Studies
William Paterson University
Former Curator, Jersey City Museum, 1993-2001

Freddy Rodríuez was born in Santiago, Dominican Republic in 1945 and moved to New York City in 1963. Studied painting at the Art Student League, and the New School for Social Research, and textile design at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Has served as a panelist for the New York State Council on the Special Arts Program, and Percent for the Arts. One of seven artists in “Current Identities” Recent Painting in the United States. The official U.S.A. representation in the IV Cuenca Biennial of Painting, Cuenca, Ecuador. Exhibition travels to 13 cities and eleven countries in Latin America. Will be profiled in the upcoming UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center’s Monograph “ A Ver: Revisioning Art History,” a project devoted to “cultural, aesthetic, and historical contributions of Chicano, Puerto Rican, Cuban, and other U.S. Latino artists whose work expands traditional notions of American history through a lifelong commitment to cultural diversity, formal experimentation, and community-based exhibition. Commissioned by New York City to design the Flight 587 Memorial. In 2011 The Smithsonian American Art Museum purchased three paintings from 1974. Served on the boards of the Artist Community Credit Union and the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art (MOCHA).

…I’ve noticed that most artists only repeat themselves.
Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968)

I see art as the ultimate form of freedom. From the beginning, my artistic and intellectual curiosity has pushed me to explore different subjects, techniques, styles and materials. I’ve been working as an artist for over 40 years, and I still need to explore new territories and possibilities with my art. After I finished my commission for NYC’s Flight 587 Memorial in 2006, I started doing a series of work on birch plywood that took me in a new direction. Breaking with my own tradition, I made no sketches and I did no research beforehand. I just wanted to paint. I called these new works “De la nada a la nada: Painting about nothing.” These works both created a different set of painting problems, and opened a new door of artistic possibilities. That’s what I find exciting about art. I made openings in the plywood, made straight cuts into it, painted on both sides of the panels and used two different abstract styles. I also made folding screens that I can make into labyrinths of colors. I used a hairdryer to push the paint around and create texture. After the hairdryer broke in 2009, I started using an air compressor to push the paint around. This created another new set of technical problems, which I finally mastered after many trials. The way the colors mix when using the air compressor is very different from how they mix using other tools such as brushes, spatula, hairdryer, sticks, and my hands . I’m very excited about the results, and I invite you to take a tour of this work and all my other past work. Welcome to my art world.

Freddy Rodríguez is a New York based artist represented by Hutchinson Modern.