space,colour, and matter

Eduardo Rodà

proscenio170@gmail.com

ANNO V No. 59

 

      Alta velocità

SPACE, COLOUR, AND MATTER

eduardo rodà

By Gianguido Fucito

Montrealer by birth (1954), Eduardo Rodà studied in Italy and in Quebec.       

This visual document is a window on his most recent works exhibited at Galerie Bernard, from November 17^th to December 18^th, 2004.

Once again, his paintings suggest a reflection on the current art scene, a pause before the image’s intrusion on everyday present life. Here are works that demonstrate different ways an image can be looked at, confronted, and opposed.

By committing himself to (geometric) abstraction, Rodà often favours the square, representing in a significant manner, the details of screen and matter through austere works reduced to their spartan essence. At first glance, his works appear rigid and static, but, they quickly reveal an uncommon depth, rich with matter, whereby the arrested image forces us to seek an area of familiarity. Textures take on a decided responsibility; spatial development allows us to relive, in a perceptual manner, the relationship between these same spaces and colour. Each painting is also a testimonial to a state of mind unconditioned by any historical reference.

Geometric abstraction is also called “cold” abstraction, shade and relief  “geometrism”, however, is still present. Rodà conducts an obstinate search of planes, forms, lines, and colours, as practiced by Dewasne, Herbin, Magnelli, Mortensen and others, even if overshadowed by Nicolas Schoffer’s “lyrical” tendency  artistic moments that emerged in the ‘60s, leading to a new direction brought on by “Op Art” and “Minimal Art”; an evolution that veered far from Mondrian’s and constructivism’s initial ideas.

Rodà plays with the effect of matter and seeks sensory values in which sign, layers of paint, and vibration of colours are predominant. Finally, his work leads us to psychological consequences brought about essentially by juxtaposition of matter as well as colour.

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10.

Bibliographical Notes

“In his most recent works, the artist creates space-screens through repetitions of form on surface, while allowing for a play of fine texture in a subtle manner. (...) Framing is the key element of the pictorial representation, the foundation stone of his proposal, whether plastic or symbolic.”

2002 – Robert Bernier, La peinture au Québec depuis les années 1960, (p. 120-121), Les Éditions de l’homme, Montréal

Proscènium. “A session of hypnosis conducted through the min- imalist works of Eduardo Rodà.”

2001 – Vidéo d’Art expérimentale de David Mollet, Montréal, Production et distribution : Arteka, Montréal, 20e Festival International du Film sur l’Art, FIFA, 12 - 17 mars 2002, Montréal

Image – Detail. “(...) delicate balance of an image that lives and surpasses the power of detail within detail. (...) Rodà offers a reflection on the immediacy of memory, at once an illusory and real vision, made up by coupling image-screens.”

2000 – Gianguido Fucito, Proscènium – Si prés si loin, Maison de la Culture Ahuntsic-Cartierville, 4 novembre - 16 décembre, Montréal

“Abstractions of historical avant-gardes, the fugacity and hardness of mediatic images, the incessant visual enticements are, from a visual perspective, used as a base for the creation of similar works, (...)”

1999 – Isabelle Riendeau, La forme dans tous ses états, Le Journal de Ville Mont-Royal et Le Point d’Outremont, 26 février et 12 mars, Montréal“

By questioning the possibilities and the limitations of painting, Rodà refuses the horizon line – a fixed point of view – obliging the spectator to immerse into the canvas in the pursuit of technological knowledge that will reveal a poetic dimension.”

1999 – Gianguido Fucito, Mémoires en Transit, Galerie Bernard, mars, Montreal”

(...) Eduardo Rodà proposes an explosive screening of his works, a game of successive inversions, where the image as object and the painting as object are conducive to reflections on the function of art and its relationship with man’s knowledge and conscience at the dawn of the 21st century.”

1998 – Sylvana Micillo Vilata, Parcours : les artistes d’origine italienne d’hier à aujourd’hui, Basilio Giordano, Montréal

“These are works to be viewed initially from a distance, to better grasp the plastic effects, then approach them slowly until the painting’s grain, whose different textures change the meaning of painted surfaces, is visible.”

1992 – Eliane Gaudet, Bleus sages, (...) Le Droit, 11 janvier, Ottawa-Hull

© Eduardo Rodà

List of works reproduced 

1. Italica – acrylic on convas 36.5 x 51 cm. - 2004 – Private Collection

2. News -  acrylic on convas 36.5 x 51 cm. – 2004 – Artist Collection

3. Parcourir 1 – acrylic on convas – 36.5 x 51 cm. – 2004 – Private                                                                                                     Collection

4. Haute Vitesse – acrylic on convas – 36.5 x 51 cm. – 2004 - Artist                                                                                                        Collection

5. Ouverture – acrylic on convas – 36.5 x 51cm. – 2004 - Artist                                                                                                          Collection

6. Fermer – acrylic on convas – 36.5 x 51 cm. – 2004 – Artist Collection

7. Electronic Storm – acrylic on convas – 36.5 x 51 cm. – 2004 –                                                                                                        Private Collection

8. Agrandir – acrylic on convas – 36.5 x 51 cm. – 2004 – Artist                                                                                                         Collection

9. Download – acrylic on convas – 36.5 x 51 cm. – 2004 –

     Leinardi Private Collection – Museo Arte Contemporanea Calassetta                     Italy

10. Mutazioni Cellulari – acrylic on convas – 36.5 x 51 cm. – 2004 –                                                                                               Artist Collection

Translated by Ana Rodà

* A free printed catalog is available for this exhibition in both English and French.  If interested, please forward your postal address to:  proscenio170@gmail.com

 

projection space

Eduardo Rodà

proscenio170@gmail.com

ANNO V No. 58

# 1.

Projection Space

Eduardo Rodà

 A selection of works since 1971

By Gianguido Fucito

The exhibition at Galerie Bernard comprises a critical overview that spans several years of paintings produced by Eduardo Rodà. An active player on the Montreal and Quebec artistic scenes, the artist is ever present, in part because of a full-bodied artistic production. We can experience his works in their different phases, from 1971 to 2008. A previous document entitled E. Rodà, Space, colour and matter, Arteka 2004, had already portrayed the artist as someone who plays on the effects of his medium, triggering sensorial values where figures, a thick layer of paint, and vibrating colours are dominating factors.

We discover the trend of simple means in this one-man show, the creation of a new genre of projection space, poetic and especially impressive.  Within the selection of his works, there emerges a space for a linear, geometric perspective, divisible by a quasi-unlimited roaming of the eye over surfaces whose forms are created by unusual colourings applied on different planes that project an impression of depth.

In analysing Rodà’s paintings, we associate them almost immediately with Concrete Art.  Concrete Art creates what is visually perceivable and its plastic realisation is conditioned by colour, by space, by light and movement. This form of art is grasped solely by the intellect: those who as yet have not experienced this art will need a few moments of conceptual reflection to understand it.

In the history of abstract art, Concrete Art was short-lived but its influence on the development of modern and contemporary art is immeasurable. Theo van Doesburg coined the term ‘concrete art’ in 1930, using it to replace ‘abstract art’. This was also the name of a magazine he had launched in April 1930, of which a single issue was printed less than a year before his death. One should note that since then, concrete art dominated articles written by several artists, such as Arp and Bill, but the fact remains that this term is the most current and, specifically from 1910 to 1930, the masters of this art (such as Kandinsky, Malevitch, Mondrian and van Doesburg) never used any other term but  ‘abstract art’.

As early as 1940, Rice Pereira defined the existence of three types of abstraction: the representative kind that assaults natural objects, affecting their core essence; the intuitive kind, which gives shape to the subconscious; and finally, the geometric or scientific notion of beauty that seeks its equivalent in plastics and emanates from the revolutionary discoveries of mathematics and physics, of biochemistry, and as well, radioactivity.

#2.

Eduardo Rodà has acquired a reputation thanks to several major exhibits, including this one, demonstrating the remarkable coherence of his trajectory, his development through thought, in accordance with plastic requirements. The canvases seem to dig themselves into squares, into an infinite void of intense clarity, making the velvety areas stand out with such precision. Rodà’s mastery affirms itself with colour, more than just a suspended and jutting reflection, in a no-gravity space. The squares, defined in such an impeccable manner, and his optic achievement throw us into a subtle, unpredictable perspective, a space we see as inhabited.

His choice of expressive space emerges in the exhibit’s title, especially in reference to his most recent works. The colour palette, the squares\details, the frequencies that join and separate, then superimpose, are asserted with the emotions felt by the viewer, the viewer who experiences a profound understanding, capable of delving deep into the painting.  It is essential for the viewer to make the necessary effort to attain meaningful insight into Rodà’s work, by imposing abstinence of searching for the lone decorative element in this type of art, elicited mostly by colours.

#3.

To better follow the evolution of Rodà’s paintings, one must think cubism, raising the idea of a new depiction of space, and, as well, futurism, seeking a new image to represent movement. On a level of social values, these two currents combined exalt a mechanical society where, rather than just concentrating on matter, one’s curiosity focuses instead on the object, similar to the way modern physics is attracted to energy. As well, abstract painting, has brought the insert to a newer level, that is, the indication of a theory of the atomic universe. Abstract painters have represented something not immaterial but rather primary, cosmic and indestructible.  The MADI movement (dialectic materialism) affirms that art is the freedom of a society constantly in the making. Since 1946, the founder of this movement, Carmelo Arden Quin, insisted that art is in space and we must explore every possibility that exists therein by confrontation between the created form and all the dimensions in the surrounding space.

#4.

Eduardo Rodà is, in his own way, very close to the current MADI movement (International Constructed Art), in wanting to express a universal art on the basic rules of physics and geometry, as are mathematics as a universal standard, applied to all sectors of human creation.  He is therefore a contemporary artist of the 21^st Century, attached to the influences and to the personalities of artists who have preceded him. 

#5.

Through his synthesized forms of elementary geometric figures – these being lines, squares, triangles, polygons, arcs, circles, crosses, points – he seeks, as do many of his contemporaries across the world, the pleasure or the joy in the most simple of fundamental spaces.

Let’s take for example Mondrian’s canvas Boogie-Woogie, which projects an impression of such joyous abandon (E. H. Gombrich, Invention et Découverte (Invention and Discovery)). We discover this same feeling that we discover in Rodà’s works, contained within the limits of a self-imposed discipline.  It is obvious that in order to appreciate them in their just place, Rodà’s work and his approach should be judged on the basis of prior movements, such as the works of Max Bill, Vanongerloo, Ellsworth Kelly, the Swiss concrete art since 1930, and the Argentine MADI movement.

 #6.

For example, Rodà’s slips of squares on a background of infinite application, challenge in us a sense of projected space towards a cosmogonic dimension, as if it were governed by an impalpable universal power yet felt so profoundly, similar to the one that sustains our new nano-technologies and thought energy. Here is an opening into the mechanics of abstraction, as demonstrated during its first years, towards a contemporary abstraction based on energy that is more in line with supporting the intrinsic values of art works.

Through contemporary technological perceptions, Rodà looks for a synthesis – an integration of form as much as matter and light, capable of suggesting new parameters for paintings that always represent through deep thinking the simple feelings full of energy that can form a more advanced base that is more in line with our contemporaneous perception and current science.

#7.

In conclusion, Rodà works with planes by playing with depth: several of his paintings are composed of two fronts brought together, one in the background, often opaque, the other more distinctive and almost transparent in certain areas, through the lighting effect that it produces. These fronts to which forms are added (squares, rectangles, etc.), relate to one another via overlapping integrations, coincidences, following a very simple set of principles. He explores the issue of space and light, of depth, visibility, shadowing, and variation in such a way that the viewer’s position brings about a new perception to the canvas, forced also by the appearance of matter-colour.

Rodà’s art ensures that knowledge and traditions, in the past upheld worldwide by many Russian, German, Swiss, Dutch, Polish, Argentine, French, American, Italian, and Canadian artists, are continued today.

As explained by Gianguido Fucito, “Abstract Art is always threatened by formalism and decoration; Kandinsky warned us: what is most important in form, is to know whether it stems from internal necessity or not.”

Texts :

(Gianguido Fucito) Arteka cabinet-conseil

www.arteka.com

Translation: Ana Domenica Rodà

© Rodà Archives’ Photos

#1. Installation view – 2008 - Galerie Bernard – Montreal - Canada

#2. Image Réflex – 1994 – acrylic on convas 122x102 cm.

#3. Facsimile 2 – 1996 - acrylic on convas 51x51 – (each)

#4. Monitor – 1991 – acrylic on convas 120x120x15 cm.   

#5. Facsimile 1 – 1993 – acrylic on convas 122x122 cm.

#6. Page Detail – Étiopia – 2002 – acrylic on convas 51x51 cm.

#7. Red Detail 4 – 2000 – acrylic on convas 51x51 cm.

*For this exhibition is available a printed catalog English          French. If interested, no cost is bound, please leave your postal address, writing to:  proscenio170@gmail.com