Roger Rodríguez (Lara, Venezuela, 1976) has developed the theme of horses since 2006. While defining the elements that would serve as a pretext for his study, he finds in the figures of Fernando Botero, the starting point to consider his own artistic explorations. He underlines the voluptuousness of horses with a Boterian style, to highlight, according to Roger Rodríguez himself, the strength, speed and temperament that are his own. However, the roundness of the forms, and hybridization between the hippocampus and the horse, and an illusory intervention of the equine physiognomy, brings his proposal closer to a dreamlike character and a bucolic world, despite the fact that the elements he uses are festive and circus. The horses are always shown along —there is a total absence of foreshortening—, emphasizing the flatness of the work, varying only the position of the extremities, with rhythmic alternation. They appear floating, gallop on unicycles, swing on balls or are suspended on carousels. Despite the fact that all these elements and figures are characterized by their attributes of movement and dynamism, they appear static. In the first stage of his work with this theme, the artist places pillars, windows and doors on the stage, as vanishing points that led to other places. In the proposal of recent years, the scenes on the contrary are flat, with undefined spaces, or interiors in which only the ceiling and the floor are observed.

The central figure of the horse is accompanied by other elements, also playful, such as the wheels, the paper steam boats that navigate in the air, the trees that grow from the floors, little houses, the face of Mickey Mouse in the form of a candy. Rodríguez dislodges the elements of their natural environments to make the exceptional something everyday. He relocates and re-signifies the logical function of objects, to trace new perceptions, disrupting the social uses to which we are accustomed with a delicate poetic halo.

Anny Bello