About Juan Rodriguez

I met Juan Rodriguez in the context of architecture, in which he himself states to be his

first frame of reference. And of architecture I have always understood that only the poor

one has to be explained by those who believe that the speech expresses what the building

experience will not recognize. But it is Juan himself who says not to able to explain his

work through words - which would surely transform him in a poet - by the contrary, he

prefers to let the images of at the mercy of the viewer's visual education. And the sharing

of this idea brings us closer but making these words unnecessary, if my intention was to

talk about the photographs shown in this exhibition.

Fortunately, what interests me the most in the work of Juan Rodriguez is the formal

dimension of his point of view - its intrinsic formality.

I am interested in reflecting on what makes him transcend the recording of reality, which

we call photography, to reach the art.

No effort should be made to discover what these works (of art) hide in their appearance,

because there is nothing to find different from what one sees: one should just learn to see

under of some principles that cannot be reduced to the ones of art as a representation.

Juan's work, not as an objective, but because it is so natural to him, deals with emancipating

himself from the visible objects, to convert them, at worst, in pure relation; relation that

naturally is not explicit or obvious but has to be recognized by a viewer with the ability

to see.

Only this synthetic process that provides the abstraction allows him to isolate, among

thousands of visual impressions of the chaotic contemporary reality that surrounds us,

what moves us here.

It doesn't seem to be in function of the technological manipulation that he transforms this

way of capturing reality in a way of artistic expression. It is, in my opinion, by his visual

and compositional action that, under the light and shadow, he selects, overlaps or

intersects, relating the visible elements and evoking thus, a disturbing formality.

Silent buildings. Enigmatic places. A beauty that brings us closer to the image as a cultural

construction.

Photography is just the tool that this photographer uses to show us a form of beauty that

is closer to the unrest than to tranquility. But that with no doubt is not afraid to hit or mute

us, while we finding it almost as an involuntary aesthetic pleasure, so hard to achieve in

a culture stunned by fast consumption.

One could then say that the landscape of the contemporary world is the main character

of his work outlined here, but no, it is not the issues (if they exist), or more or less subtle

features, or a clever light control, which carry his photographs to an artistic scope, it is

the latent nature in his approach that subverts our normal view. It is the revealed tensions

between light, shadow, the surfaces or the emptiness that make the space emerge in a

vibration of his inner self - Juan himself alerts to the nonexistence of chance ... An interior

of himself not only capable of creating his own view, but of subverting what is our banal

reality. Which confuses the usual order of things, not because he sees or makes us see

an extraordinary reality, but because through his work the visual beats the visible, which

means that the power of vision precedes and goes beyond the description of what is

seen. And the aesthetic sense is determined by these elements that make us - the motion,

the blur, the vibrant whites or the infinite grays which in their intrinsic formality, disrupt

diaphragm of the traditional view.

His photos (as he says) are not autobiographical, because they are too abstract, but when

he records a reality that we share, when seeing what he photographed, we discover that

what he actually picks up comes from within him.