To disavow painting, as postmodern painters have done, is a way of affirming the continuous and unsatisfied search from art. It is from this denial of verisimilitude that pictorial creation separates itself from life, painting its own limits, to constantly reestablish forms and formulas of understanding the pictorial, approaching change as the constant of the universe.
Observing Diego Rodarte's work, I was able to detect how this painter starts from a paradox that has been restated time and again by the different realisms throughout history: the world is not what it seems. Indeed, the ways of painting focus on several aspects. From capturing the physical resemblance, adopting an unusual perspective to see, catching the feeling of a place and determining significant relationships between objects. In his works it is evident how realism obeys to different ways of understanding the world around us and the way we perceive it. In his obsessive research into pictorial narratives, driven by optics and the symbolic, Rodarte's works are guided by the paradigm: to imagine is the product of the mental negation of what the senses perceive.
José Manuel Springer
First edition, 2020
Searching for #MEXICO is an interior look at the exterior dimension of the country, of its geography and of what inhabits the superficial limits of the skin of the Mexican territory. Looking at this exteriority from the intimacy of a working studio to which the exterior images have arrived from a computer calls into question the idea of inside and outside.
This series of pictorial works by Diego Rodarte were conceived at the end of last year to be exhibited in Poland. The world, without knowing it, was a few weeks away from entering one of the most unsuspected and complex stages of the last hundred years: the COVID-19 pandemic.
Santiago Espinosa de los Monteros
First edition, 2021
