Dagoberto Rodríguez

Dagoberto Rodríguez, one of Cuba’s best-known artists, has long mined art and art history for hidden meanings. Like Wassily Kandisky and Kazimir Malevich, he has explored the allusive “forms that haunted the avant-garde and mystics in the past.” In Geometría Popular, his latest video, Rodríguez cycles through what he has termed “three phases of human grouping”: the square, the triangle and the circle; each of which, he posits, describe narrative schemes of anger, peace, and submission. According to the artist “behind each human action, be it a dance, assembly or meeting; behind each human conflict, military squadrons, parades or the arrangement of trenches, there’s a hidden geometry that visualizes and explains our relationships in a different way.” Rodríguez’s work suggests these geometries not only lead to primary forms of composition, but to fundamental aesthetic, symbolic, and existential differences affecting groups of human beings in contemporary culture.

— CVF, USFCAM