Texts
Selected Critical Texts
2025
On The Ruins Of Modernity Only Traces And Surfaces (Of Color) Remain
Author: Daniel Montero
Fondazione MACC Vol. 6 Omar Rodriguez-Graham
"Over the past decade or so, Rodriguez-Graham’s painting has consistently followed a particular logic and method: a form of planar construction initiated by the deformation of an original image. In my view, this approach connects back to one of Cézanne’s most significant contributions to the history of painting, namely, his investigation of structure, which led to the elevation of the pictorial plane into an autonomous reality. Such structural enquiry is by no means secondary, for upon careful reflection, it can only be expressed through painting in a sensitive manner. Although this might be understood as a metaphysical stance, it fundamentally reflects how reality is perceived and translated into visual representation. From this standpoint, structural artworks are not mere abstractions but partial, hypothetical proposals about the behaviour of reality."
- Daniel Montero
2024
Variación No. 1 - Exhibition Text
Author: Magnolia de la Garza
"This quest by the artist to break with traditional pictorial space fits within another current that emerged during the 20th century. Artistic movements like Madí, which arose in Argentina in the 1940s, and whose members broke with the conventions of painting of their time by creating works on irregular canvases, anticipated what would become the shaped canvas of North American painting in the 1960s, with Frank Stella as one of its leading exponents. While we can understand Rodriguez-Graham's work within this tradition of breaking with the traditional format of painting, his work takes it a step further, since the concept of expanding composition shapes the supports of his paintings: there is no canvas that contains the composition."
- Magnolia de la Garza
Variación No. 1 - Magnolia de la Garza.pdf
(50.76 KB)
2017
Allegorical Post-formalism
Author: Willy Kautz
Anamnesis
"The set of works that make up Omar Rodriguez-Graham’s Anamnesis are part of an era in which painting after history should be understood as painting history itself. But this approach should not be limited solely to an analytic reflection on the pictorial tradition, but in terms of an experience of aesthetic pleasure. The shifting of subjectivity through the gesture reveals how pictorial poetics can be a disorientating act, whose purpose lies in resignifying the meaning of the allegories in such a way that its emotive charge – psychic and mnemonic – finds new formulas of visual materialization. It is thus that Omar Rodriguez-Graham’s analytic works reveal how allegorical expression of the pictorial persists after the end of modernist and postmodernist painting. Proof that painting as a poetic gesture or allegorical impulse has no end."
- Willy Kautz
Selected Press
2025
Una Experiencia Inestable y Expandida
Author: Maria Giner
Revista Ideal
"Aunque hace más de una década dejó
atrás la figura, hay en sus abstracciones
actuales rastros de esa etapa rigurosa, casi
académica, en que la luz, el volumen y la
proporción eran clave. Hoy, todo eso muta
en manchas, brochazos, zonas saturadas y
otras casi rasuradas de color o excesos de
material sobre la superficie. El cuadro res-
pira. Y la pintura, más que una imagen, se
vuelve una experiencia inestable y expandi-
da, cual juego visual."
atrás la figura, hay en sus abstracciones
actuales rastros de esa etapa rigurosa, casi
académica, en que la luz, el volumen y la
proporción eran clave. Hoy, todo eso muta
en manchas, brochazos, zonas saturadas y
otras casi rasuradas de color o excesos de
material sobre la superficie. El cuadro res-
pira. Y la pintura, más que una imagen, se
vuelve una experiencia inestable y expandi-
da, cual juego visual."
- Maria Giner
2024
Critic's Pick
Author: Juan José Santos
Art Forum
"Rodriguez-Graham's creations have lost their chromatic balance, geometric
references, and vanishing points. But if one spends enough time observing
them, an underlying order emerges. Colibrí Azul (Blue Hummingbird) |
shows a clash of vivid diagonal lines, arches, and strata, as if the canvases
from Paolo Uccello's seminal "The Battle of San Romano" series (ca. 1435-
55) have been shuffled and reinvorgated in Technicolor. This whimsical
motif is further reflected in La Oscuridad del Sol (The Darkness of the Sun)
where a splattering of innumerable multicolored curvatures overcome the
frame, projecting comic-bubble-like silhouettes from the gallery wall. El
Largo Asedio de la Noche (The Long Siege of the Night) shows a similar
amalgam of hand-painted textures, with varicolored tendrilous patterns
encapsulated on a wooden cutout. The works' titles, which evolve from the
hummingbird's morning song to the eclipse of nightfall, bring order to
Rodriguez-Graham's chaotic contours, enacting an esthetic that is both
historical and futuristic, time-honored and visionary."
references, and vanishing points. But if one spends enough time observing
them, an underlying order emerges. Colibrí Azul (Blue Hummingbird) |
shows a clash of vivid diagonal lines, arches, and strata, as if the canvases
from Paolo Uccello's seminal "The Battle of San Romano" series (ca. 1435-
55) have been shuffled and reinvorgated in Technicolor. This whimsical
motif is further reflected in La Oscuridad del Sol (The Darkness of the Sun)
where a splattering of innumerable multicolored curvatures overcome the
frame, projecting comic-bubble-like silhouettes from the gallery wall. El
Largo Asedio de la Noche (The Long Siege of the Night) shows a similar
amalgam of hand-painted textures, with varicolored tendrilous patterns
encapsulated on a wooden cutout. The works' titles, which evolve from the
hummingbird's morning song to the eclipse of nightfall, bring order to
Rodriguez-Graham's chaotic contours, enacting an esthetic that is both
historical and futuristic, time-honored and visionary."
- Juan José Santos
2020
Interview with Omar Rodriguez-Graham
Author: Jessica Steller
Whitehot Magazine
- Jessica Steller