Ender Rodríguez, a graduate in Education, is a Venezuelan artist, based in San Cristóbal, Táchira. He is characterized by being a multidisciplinary creator, since in his artistic work he puts into practice mixed media such as drawing, painting, photography, sculpture, installation, poetry, video, and action art (performance), using all kinds of materials and taking advantage of their expressive possibilities.

When Rodríguez says: “I paint as if triggering”, we infer that he, in front of his blank supports, canvas or paper, somehow acts as an action artist. In his creative process he puts into practice all his load of vital and artistic experiences. Rodríguez leads us to remember the German artist Joseph Beuys, for whom “every act is a work of art”; in his opinion art and life are a single entity. In Ender Rodríguez something of the spirit of this German artist can be seen.

Our Venezuelan artist proposes to put art into action through controversial and ironic acts, whose visual and conceptual treatment shakes the viewer and leads him to think and question the behavior of any established system: political, social, religious, and artistic. He has been persistent in the ideas and concepts that support his aesthetic proposal, in which, formally, color and expressive, gestural brushwork prevail; the disproportionate figures, deformed to the grotesque level, ingredients that, together with the appropriation and reinterpretation of icons that refer to national and international art, he uses to question the classic concept of good taste and beauty. In this sense, his work can also be related to Bad Painting, a figurative pictorial movement that emerged in the 70s in the United States. But it is clear that Rodríguez, regardless of the stylistic associations we can make with his work, has created a very personal style.

José Gregorio Noroño