"… a shadow is a simultaneous memory..."
What to make of a figure that casts no shadow? In painting class recently, I overheard a conversation between the tutor and a fellow student. The question was how to give objects weight, to convey a convincing sense of the thing in its place - material, situated - rather than floating weightless in space. The answer: shadows. The shadow helps to ground the object, helps it to sit believably in the world. A shadow, after all, is an area in which light has been blocked, or partially blocked, by the presence of an object (or animal or person). The shadow is therefore confirmation that the object (or animal or person) exists. Which is why it is sometimes said that ghosts and vampires do not cast shadows, for their existence is not subject to the ordinary rules of proof. You either believe or you do not.
Now look carefully at the figures in the paintings of Francisco Rodriguez. What do you see? Or rather, what do you not see? Shadows. It isn't that Rodriguez never paints shadows, but they are rare, so when he does, it's worth asking yourself what they are up to. Atardecer (2020), for example, shows a man testing the point of a knife surreptitiously behind his back, while his inky dark shadow hangs against the white wall behind. You'd expect there to be a shadow in this work: atardecer is Spanish for 'sunset'. Meanwhile, as their titles suggest, Wolf Shadow and Shadow and Dog (both 2022) are works in which shadows play a central compositional role. In the former, a dark wolf shape falls across a pale grey wall: is it cast by the nearby man or is he its imminent prey? In the latter, a dog (always a sign of danger or unease in Rodriguez's work) casts a grey double against a red brick wall while across the sandy foreground the shadow of a man - hatted, smoking - is all we see of a figure, who presumably stands behind us, or maybe even is us. And yet, Rodriguez has also painted the sun, glowing white in the pink sky ahead. Which means, rather curiously, that both these shadows are falling in the wrong direction.
Rodriguez's 2023 paintings are almost entirely free of shadows. These latest works build upon Assembly (2021), which depicted a classroom hastily emptied due to events in 2006, when the local student union in Santiago, Chile - where Rodriguez was born and grew up - started a movement against the last traces of the Pinochet regime. Rodriguez has now returned to this scene, or ones like it - the same beige floor, red lower wall, and white upper. In part, this return has been influenced by a visit back to his school as well as ongoing conversations with childhood friends. 'I'm doing the painting I was thinking about four years ago,' Rodriguez tells me. 'When I moved to London I started to see Santiago. If I moved away then I would start to paint London.'
This time, the school spaces have been repopulated with a consistent cast of characters, mostly adolescent boys in their school uniforms of charcoal trousers, navy jumpers and white shirts untucked. The series shows familiar forms of teenage rebellion. Across classroom blackboards meant for prescribed modes of learning, these characters scrawl simple slogans - 'odio matematicas' ('I hate maths') or 'muerte a los cuicos' ('death to the rich') - and the names of punk bands like Fiskales Ad-Hok or CLAMM (March Riots III, 2023). They roam, laze, smoke, squabble and scuffle. With dark hair and skin flushing red, they sometimes seem a little vampiric. Some are even transparent, like ghosts. And not one of them casts a shadow.
Given that, where they do appear, Rodriguez's shadows mostly read as malevolent and confusing, might the artist's latest works be characterised by a sense of lightness? Or, building upon the idea that shadows help to situate things in their context, might we speculate that the latest works are somehow a little unmoored from a sense of place and time? Writers often contextualise Rodriguez's work in relation to Chilean history. He was born in Santiago in 1989 and grew up in a turbulent period following the end of Pinochet's murderous dictatorship. Dark scruffy shadows, threatening dogs, leering mask-like faces: these recurring elements are generally read as reflections upon a time marked by suspicion, ongoing violence and the lingering shadows of past atrocities. But Rodriguez has been living in London since 2014. In his latest works, the violence so often identified with his work feels even more cartoon-like, not serious. The playful bites of young wolves - not quite the real thing.
Whatever the underlying cause - and perhaps it is simply the height of the Chilean day-time sun - the effect of this shadowlessness is to suspend the figures in mid-air, as if they had been cut out and could be moved around. As if the narrative we see unfurling could always unfurl differently. This impression is heightened in the studio as the artist moves works around like a director shuffling tiles in a movie storyboard. It underlines the sense that there is something unreal about the figures in all of Rodriguez's paintings - 'archetypes', he calls them, like characters or figures from a dream rather than real people with individual personalities. I'm reminded of Alejandro Zambra's description of the two central figures in his novella, Bonsai: 'Emilio and Julio - who aren't exactly characters, though maybe it's best to think of them that way.'
Rodriguez himself cites fifteenth-century artist and mathematician Paolo Uccello as an influence on his current works, especially the six-panel altarpiece Miracle of the Desecrated Host (1467-1469). Uccello is known as a pioneer of perspective but there is also a flatness to his figures that you can see in Rodriguez's work too. He likens Uccello's works to theatre sets, while describing the people in his own paintings as 'dolls', there to be manipulated in the service of the story. There is one work in which Uccello's influence is especially direct. Although most of his new paintings are classroom scenes, Rodriguez has also produced several large-scale panoramic exteriors, such as A Warm Night (2023), which situate the action like cinematic establishing shots. Rodriguez compares these backyard scenes, divided by fences, surrounded by mountains and sky, to the enclosed spaces created by works of fiction (he cites writers such as Mario Vargas Llosa and Christine Carbo as influences). In the fictional space of a novel, the world beyond can be a looming presence - a place of possible threat or escape - but it always remains just a little out of reach.
The most threatening work, for me, is one of these exterior scenes: The Revenge, 2023. Or rather, it is a scene in which the reassuring division between exterior and interior is imaginatively ruptured. In Uccello's work, guards beat down the door to the home of a Jewish family. In Rodriguez's painting, it is a group of schoolkids outside a two-storey red brick house. The narrative suggested by the title is that the little gang are seeking revenge for the posters pasted across the concrete wall behind. This feels conceptually significant: an image propels the narrative, which in turn provides the material for another image.
The house, however, is painted in cross-section so that the private space of the interior is exposed to public view. Rodriguez occasionally paints intimate bedroom scenes in which adolescent boys are shown alone, occasionally topless (for example, Boy Sleeping or Dressing, both 2022). These scenes feel like safe spaces, away from the pressure to perform a certain kind of masculinity. Which is why the cross-section in The Revenge, with its implied rupturing of the possibility of such privacy, feels so potent. Upstairs, a grinning figure holds what looks like a pool cue. It is unclear if he intends to use it as a weapon.
Two elements of this painting are drawn directly from Uccello: the pose of the figure battering the door and the cross-section that reveals the building's inhabitants. These examples show Rodriguez's deft ability to bring together multiple source materials and make them his own. As a child, he was encouraged by his brother to learn to paint by copying works by Velazquez and Rubens that he studied in art history books. At school he drew cartoons to satirise his teachers and entertain his classmates. Japanese anime and woodblock prints have been long-term influences, as Rodriguez has sought to navigate between several different traditions in order to, as he tells me, 'create a world and live in it'.
Rodriguez also employs multiple techniques to imbue his work with a rich array of textures and effects. So while most works are predominantly flat, especially when viewed from afar, up close you can see that they are anything but. The rough ground of the exterior scenes, for example, is created by adding sand to the paint. The Weight of the Night (2023), the last work completed for this exhibition, is an especially virtuosic example. In clear contrast to the flat planes of colour is Rodriguez's handling of human skin. These areas are less graphic and more blurry. Instead of drawing an outline and filling it, he uses wide flat brushes to draw and erase repeatedly in layers to create a sense of complexity and psychological inscrutability. Mistakes also provide important elements - these are not perfect images. 'When I'm painting I try to be as open as possible to what is happening on the surface,' he tells me. Up close you can see little drips and spots, or areas where masking tape has pulled a layer of paint away from the surface, thereby revealing a little of the process by which each work is constructed. Influenced by this, Rodriguez then painted masking tape holding up pages in the classroom. He contrasts these effects with the fully sewn-up, high-gloss imagery of, for example, advertising. His art subtly reveals its own processes of creation.
Taken together, Rodriguez's works may be read as sustained explorations of the power of images. Not only does he draw upon a wide range of influences but he also plays with ways in which his own works exist as material objects in the world. One example is his use of posters. These provide opportunities to repeat the same motifs, like the artist of a graphic novel, but they also show how images occupy the world and, in doing so, influence the way we see. Some drawings are framed on walls. Others lie scrumpled across the classroom floor. Some works of art are valued. Others are not. Rodriguez tells me that several of the drawings scribbled on graph paper depicted within the paintings are actually cartoons that he drew at school. Apparently, his classmates have saved them for all these years. What this means is that, in the world of the paintings, the scribbled drawings are often actually real, while the apparent reality of the surrounding world is in fact a carefully composed fiction. The result is a dizzying mise-en-abyme of game-like world-building.
One particular work, March Riots II (2023) shows a boy falling backwards onto the classroom floor in front of us. The pose, Rodriguez shows me, has been taken from a figure in the foreground of Pieter Bruegel the Elder's painting The Triumph of Death (1562 - 1563), in which an army of skeletons wreak destruction upon the few humans left to resist. With the composition tightly cropped, in contrast to Bruegel's sprawling epic, it's hard to gauge what Rodriguez's figure was up to before the fall - standing on the nearby desk, perhaps, sticking drawings to the wall with masking tape. The figure falls towards the ground but there is no shadow. Has he landed yet? It is as if he has been cut out and placed there, which in a way he has - cut out from Bruegel, placed in a half-remembered Santiago classroom.
In Memoirs of the Blind, a text about the origins of drawing, Jacques Derrida writes in characteristically dense fashion about objects, images and shadows. And he also writes about falling: 'Detached from the present of perception,' he writes, 'fallen from the thing itself - which is thus divided - a shadow is a simultaneous memory...'
I'm reminded of this rather opaque sentence, while looking at March Riots II in the studio. For, in the midst of the fall, the figure's black shoe has come off. This little moment is, I think, one of the strangest in all his work. The figure's sock has been painted in the same way as the rest of his clothing - in a block of flat colour - but the foot elongates into a disconcerting point. Just below lies the shoe, which is depicted in a totally distinct visual language - more like that of the scribbled graph paper drawings than that of the 'real' world of the rest of the painting. It is as if one thing is becoming another - painting becoming drawing, world becoming work. The shoe lies there like the drawing of a shadow. But there is no shadow. And suddenly it seems for a moment that this artfully constructed world is crumbling, joyfully unstable. But only for a moment. We are soon persuaded back into the reality that Rodriguez has constructed. But I remain troubled by the shadows, or lack of them, and my own blurrily imagined or even simultaneous memory.
1. Alejandro Zambra, Bonsai (2006), trans. Megan McDowell (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2022) p28
2. Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: the self-portrait and other ruins (1990) trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) p175