Matadero Madrid center for contemporary creation
CARLOS RODRÍGUEZ-MÉNDEZ
SEATED MEN
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Male residents of Madrid over 70 years of age were asked to make a continuous and audible sound for a minute while the artist photographed and recorded the top of their heads as seen from above. Seated men seeks artistic insertion on the aged bodies of elderly men. These men are represented as intense physical and emotional material. The sounds they emit burst into the project and provide real and tangible information about their bodies, which the artist uses to analyze the language and procedural principles of sculpture.
How does one face a public vivisection? During the ten-year span of his career, Carlos Rodríguez-Méndez (Pontevedra, 1968) has been performing a particular kind of "anatomy lesson” that joins psychological and visual tension together, in such a way that the elements of a traumatic experience are transformed through sculpture, installation work, video and photography, creating a new constellation of meaning. Facing the public or with his back to the audience, on official occasions or on an ordinary day, spontaneously or intentionally, staying in context or going beyond original geopolitical and cultural (and therefore necessarily mental) references, the artist manoeuvres through situations that provide the opportunity to confront face-to-face the limits obstacles imposed on us by the system related to a sense or meaning of belonging. What is essential is trauma experienced on two levels: on a family/social hierarchical level and spatiomaterial/physical relationship level. In a constant battle between the forces set add odds on these different levels, Rodríguez-Méndez shows us the dark underbelly of the human condition, one in which the efforts of a lone man to erect a bridge over emptiness (the eternal nothing) are revealed to be just as illusory as the absurdity of our very existence. Locked within this order of things, Rodríguez-Méndez's artist practice is built using an ample variety of materials (earth, water, stones, bricks, chickens, meat, salt, fruit and, provoking controversy, the human body). What has made him recognise and classify these materials as intrinsically sculptural is their capacity to retain their potential for expression, which remains a powerful tool in the artist's construction of his personal artistic consciousness.
The essential attitude Carlos Rodríguez-Méndez transmits with Seated men is similar to that of a surgeon, painstaking in his work. In an atmosphere limited by the confines of the uselessness of language, the birds-eye view of the enigmatic images of faceless elderly men- seated and static, their imposing overexposed heads matched to inarticulate sounds- defines the artist's struggle to integrate art into the day-to-day. This permanent vertical point of view, apparently innocuous but sharply critical, questions the patriachal system of rules and revolves around depictions of power, bearing witness to the tension between the symbology of artistic expression and the rigidness of the mental state. Thus, Seated men seems to vindicate the visibility and autonomy of an image-sculpture that, paradoxically, questions the limits of authority while pointing out the very center of its motor, the immobility of the brain.
(original Spanish text: Marko Stamenkovic)
How does one face a public vivisection? During the ten-year span of his career, Carlos Rodríguez-Méndez (Pontevedra, 1968) has been performing a particular kind of "anatomy lesson” that joins psychological and visual tension together, in such a way that the elements of a traumatic experience are transformed through sculpture, installation work, video and photography, creating a new constellation of meaning. Facing the public or with his back to the audience, on official occasions or on an ordinary day, spontaneously or intentionally, staying in context or going beyond original geopolitical and cultural (and therefore necessarily mental) references, the artist manoeuvres through situations that provide the opportunity to confront face-to-face the limits obstacles imposed on us by the system related to a sense or meaning of belonging. What is essential is trauma experienced on two levels: on a family/social hierarchical level and spatiomaterial/physical relationship level. In a constant battle between the forces set add odds on these different levels, Rodríguez-Méndez shows us the dark underbelly of the human condition, one in which the efforts of a lone man to erect a bridge over emptiness (the eternal nothing) are revealed to be just as illusory as the absurdity of our very existence. Locked within this order of things, Rodríguez-Méndez's artist practice is built using an ample variety of materials (earth, water, stones, bricks, chickens, meat, salt, fruit and, provoking controversy, the human body). What has made him recognise and classify these materials as intrinsically sculptural is their capacity to retain their potential for expression, which remains a powerful tool in the artist's construction of his personal artistic consciousness.
The essential attitude Carlos Rodríguez-Méndez transmits with Seated men is similar to that of a surgeon, painstaking in his work. In an atmosphere limited by the confines of the uselessness of language, the birds-eye view of the enigmatic images of faceless elderly men- seated and static, their imposing overexposed heads matched to inarticulate sounds- defines the artist's struggle to integrate art into the day-to-day. This permanent vertical point of view, apparently innocuous but sharply critical, questions the patriachal system of rules and revolves around depictions of power, bearing witness to the tension between the symbology of artistic expression and the rigidness of the mental state. Thus, Seated men seems to vindicate the visibility and autonomy of an image-sculpture that, paradoxically, questions the limits of authority while pointing out the very center of its motor, the immobility of the brain.
(original Spanish text: Marko Stamenkovic)
