Rodrigo Echeverría: Qué Cholulada! 

Curated by Wendy Cabrera Rubio and Pablo Arredondo Vera

August 23 – September 21, 2024

Rodrigo Echeverría (Mexico 1988) is a self-taught painter that, as stated by Nicolas Medina Mora, “follows a very different set of formal laws than those that govern much of contemporary Mexican art. His oeuvre is too diverse and too original to fit comfortably in one or another school and the omnivorous curiosity that nurtures his sensibility could well be described as [that of a] neobarroque painter.” Echeverria began painting from an early age within the context of a conservative and Catholic society. After graduating from university he saw firsthand that the most effective learning happens outside of institutions. As observed by Medina Mora, Echeverría “collect[s] gestures, colors and styles that he then makes his own, not through disrespectful appropriation, but rather by drinking from the countless fountains of human diversity. The fundamental effect that Echeverría’s canvases induce in the viewer is a sort of confusion that proves sometimes joyful, others disquieting, but always productive. Each successive viewing reveals new possibilities, new references, new readings.” His paintings are divided into figurative, portraiture and landscape. He has had important portrait commissions including a portrait of the second room of the Nation’s Supreme Court of Justice and his collectors encompass all levels of society. 

Like the shoaling angels of Santa María de Tonantzintla, Rodrigo Echeverría's paintings reveal the discomfort when categorization is broken and the order of the world is invalidated. The paintings in this exhibition are otherworldly creatures that disrupt identity by transgressing binarisms. Echeverría's contemporaneity lies in creating artworks in which every hierarchy crumbles.
As in the baroque, the boundaries are exceeded by destabilizing: neither self, nor other, in his paintings, the figures are denoted by collapsing into other bodies. His pictorial style imprints in his work not only a sense of chaos and dissolution, but also a delicate exuberance in which planes of color overlap, invading other forms. The work presents a world of incessant fluidity, governed by unstoppable forces that dismember each body, in a way that is as exhilarating as it is terrifying. Echeverría proposes a dystopian and hopeful cosmovision, conveying the continuous change, senselessness, regeneration and uninterrupted mutation that evokes the operations of a body whose physical reality is death.
The deformations that invade his production fulfill an important critical function: they present grotesque reproductions of the self that subvert the idealized representations of spirituality, approaching the truth of the human being.

- Text by Wendy Cabrera Rubio.

For catalogue and artist’s CV contact info@jo-hs.com