The Biggest Problem that Confronts Us Is the Fact that a High Percentage of Contemporary Imagery has Lost its Awareness of the Poetic
By: Samantha Jezowicz, Chelsea Doyle, and Angela Figueroa
Jose Rodeiro is an award-winning painter. He was born February 5th and raised in Ybor City, Tampa, Florida by his parents, Dr. José Antonio Rodeiro and Mrs. Olga Pérez Rodeiro. During his career, he lived and worked in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and northern New Jersey for over twenty-five years and he has obtained major art fellowships from: the National Endowment for the Arts, completed in Barcelona (1986-87); The Fulbright Scholars’ Program, CIES, completed in Managua Nicaragua (1995); The Institute for International Education, Oscar B. Cintas Foundation (1982); Inter-American-Development Bank, BID (1991); as well as other grants. Rodeiro holds a Ph.D. from the College of Fine Arts in Ohio, a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Pratt Institute, and a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Tampa, and has held official artist-residencies in Maryland and Florida and was a professor in the Art Department at New Jersey City University, Jersey City, NJ. He is an internationally published author and has published critiques and historical studies, such as “An Iconological Critique of Duda Penteado’s We Are You,” found at
http://www.gerolatino.org/duda_essay.html. Dr. Rodeiro answered our questions via email.
1. Can you tell me about any influences you had with specific artists? Have they ever changed over time?
As a young child, the first paintings that I paid attention to were created by three French women artists: Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Marie-Denise Villers, and Rosa Bonheur. These works were printed-on-canvas reproductions purchased by my mother and hung by my father on the walls of my family’s home in Ybor City. As a young child, I did not know that these images were by women and neither did my parents know that; they simply bought & hung these three artists’ works because they liked them. Yet, as a result, my whole artistic life derives from seeing as a toddler, painting by three female painters: Vigée Le Brun, Villers, and Bonheur.
"Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun - Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat" by irinaraquel
is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Once I began studying art history, during my teenage years, I realized that my three favorite painters were Diego Velazquez, Francisco Goya, and Édouard Manet. As an adult, I admire flexible artists like Gerhard Richter, Milton Glaser, or Picasso, who (like me) simultaneously work in several styles concurrently, in which the choice of subject-matter determines the style. For me, specifically, thematic subjects include “cats,” “people,” “landscapes,” “bodegones” (“still-life images”), mermaids, and wild-horses. Each subject or theme provokes a specific stylistic preference. Yet, to answer, your question, I still maintain my same (constant and unsullied) youthful preferences, e.g., Rosa Bonheur’s “Horse Fair” is still informs my current horse imagery; Goya effects my dicey forays “into” “Duende Art,” (https://www.duendeart.org/) and, despite everything, Velazquez remains my favorite old master.Because art exists beyond time (free of time), my aesthetic sources & influences remain the same as when I was a child. Both to do, imagine, and create, art requires faithfulness, endurance, and constancy.
"Rosa Bonheur: 'The Horse Fair'" by euthman is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
2. What do you think is your responsibility as an artist?
Below in #5, I furnish a more political answer (READ BELOW in Question 5)... But, however, beyond mere politics, what all art (and concomitantly every real artist (including me)) has eternally striven for is: “the unity in diversity of all things.” For anyone blessed with prolific creative artistic gifts, Art is (for such beings) the enigmatic unifying principle of the cosmic universe. Through art, the tiniest basic molecule, a tiny dot, a drop of pigment can expand into Pollock’s “Number 1 (Lavender Mist),” because (for humanity and for artists), Art is mankind’s secret sanctuary: a portal into divinity and immortality, allowing as William Blake said in “The Auguries of Innocence:” “To see a World in a Grain of Sand. And a Heaven in a Wild Flower. Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand. And Eternity in an hour.” For artists and their appreciators, works of art (the very intent and process of artistic creation) both vent and encourage Henri Bergson’s creative eruptions, which can endure forever, e.g. Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus,” any Van Gogh sunflower painting, or any other visual image marked with eternal perfection, including imagery within poems by visual poets, i.e., Keats, Poe, Lorca, etc. The proof of this is Apelles’s grand manner art, because although unseen for centuries, his images remain (for many) the greatest artworks ever created, because, like all artists, Apelles’s art continues cosmically assisting, perpetuating, and reinforcing all Creation’s unending creativity (a la Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s idea that any work of art is always a divine re-alliance with God, re-affording the chance to work alongside Him instantly (once again) as an assistant “helping” Him (by God’s grace) during the first seven days of Creation). Paul Cezanne had it right when he counselled Émile Bernard in a 1904 letter, “. . . paint. Therein, lies salvation.”
Fresco from Pompei, Casa di Venus, 1st century AD. Dug out in 1960. It is supposed that this fresco could be the Roman copy of famous portrait of Campaspe, mistress of Alexander the Great. This mural from Pompeii is believed to be based on Apelles' Venus Anadyomene, brought to Rome by Augustus. archive of Stephen Haynes: http://www.shaynes.com/Photos/Italy_Spring_2004/CRW_8457.htm
3. Has geographic location played an influence on your artwork, specifically the inspiration you found when you went to Nicaragua?
Yes, the volcanic landscape of Nicaragua has circuitously manifested itself into my work. Nicaragua has had the greatest impact on my landscape painting. Generally, like in Michelangelo’s paintings, for me, landscapes function simply as a mere background; as a setting (a scenario). However, Nicaraguan volcanoes transfixed the landscape into a form of figural subject matter.
4. What do you want your audience to feel or think after looking at your art?
I believe that great art always expresses creative inspiration(s), echoing Henrí Bergson’s concept of primal élan vital with its veritable Primordialism (or Neo-Shamanism). My art results from a peculiar artistic morphogenesis wherein enigmatic forgotten shapes spring from what Dr. Nicomedes Suarez-Arauz calls “Amnesis artistic lacunae,” wherein mental images house a lost immanent labyrinthic Amnesis mental cave whose ‘cave-walls’ are furtively covered (or decked) with nearly-vanished animistic, shamanic, elemental or atavistic images. These Amnesis “lost objects” are artistically transposed from my immanent mind into “the viewer’s” sensate transcendental realm by flatly applying an array of sublime chromatic hues (burnt violets, icy blues, rosy pinks, and burnt orange) as distinct organic or abstract morphogenic shapes that are painted with pigments on a flat surface, transmitting my mind’s innate individual intuitive vision(s) into numerous visible shapes, forms, and spaces ‒ resulting in an enigmatic musical and poetic push/pull medley of metaphors, symbols, signs, and surfaces.
5. As one of the founding members of the Neo-Latino Collective, what do you believe the objectives are and how does your work fit into it?
Neo-Latino Collective is a group of working artists who came together in 2003 to collaborate, curate, and create space for the Latinx voice in the arts today. Based in New Jersey but with a community branching across the United States and beyond, the group has produced events and exhibitions in California, Colorado, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York. In a country where people and culture are constantly in flux and moving towards a Latinx-integrated/majority/infused future, Neo-Latino believes that the presence and voice of Latinx in the arts is critical and constant. From its founding in 2003, when the late-Raúl Villarreal (1964 - 2019) named the cohort: “The Neo-Latinos;” the group continues to be the oldest coast-to-coast Latinx art movement of the 21st Century, assembling a Pan-Latinx transcultural amalgam of visual artists,
Out on the town, 2007, Oil on linen, 51” x 31”
The Cintas Foundation Collection, Miami Dade County Museum of Art & Design.(https://www.ragazine.cc/jose-rodeiro-artist-interview/)
whose ancestral identities can be traced to over a dozen Latin-nations, myriad ethnicities, and cultures. Over the years, through numerous artistic collaborations, kindling a host of concomitant curated exhibitions, Neo-Latinx artists aspire to create viable spaces for Latinx visual art to flourish, be seen, and accepted. Headquartered in New Jersey’s metropolitan area, but with an active community branching across the United States and beyond, the group has produced events and exhibitions in California, Colorado, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York. And, during a time, when people and culture are constantly in flux, by dynamically encompassing Pan-Latinx transcultural awareness, greater cultural synthesis, ethnic-fusion, and a host of aesthetic cultural admixtures, Neo-Latinoism endeavors to achieve greater artistic inclusivity, via an artistic trajectory aimed at socio-cultural aesthetic ideals (i.e., Justice, Equality, and Freedom); while striving to forge an artistic community and an aesthetic movement linked by Pan-Latinx cultural solidarity. In the visual arts, Neo-Latinoism advances and manifests fluid and conditional aspects of ethno-cultural, as well as national identity formation. Additionally, the movement seeks a cultural amalgam characterized by transcultural fertilization, artistic evolution, and by the sedimentary “visual” fusion of diverse cultural symbols and elements. Thus, through the lens of visual culture, Neo-Latinos strive in their art to present a more complex, prismatic vision of Latinx identity, subjectivity and consciousness.
6. What is the best piece of advice you can give to future artists and
other creatives?
As visual artists, the biggest problem that confronts us is the fact that a high percentage of contemporary imagery has, for the most part, lost its awareness of the poetic. Thus, far too many artists (at this time) produce art as if it were only a technical mechanical production and not creativity. We owe this failure to five historic and art historic factors: 1.) the rise of digital technology, which exalted machine-made ‘screen-based’ media, animation, pictures, visual effects, displays, self-seeking selfies and other forms of hyper-reality favoring these mechanized fads over visionary ‘deep-image’ visual poesy. On every level, the digital revolution damaged and diluted humanity’s capacity for true and untrammeled verbal and visual-verbal communication, as well as harming fine arts’ inherent predilection for individual visionary imaginative fabulations, as well as generally eradicating popular awareness of immanent linguistic imagery, except for the habitual use of Pierre Reverdy and André Breton’s theory of discordant imagery in most television advertising, as well as most print advertising. 2.) Sadly, the mid-1970s’ worldwide demise of proper liberal arts education stultified humanity’s interest in poetic language, which negatively affected literacy. As the 21st Century unfolded, 3.) literature and visual art (even music) contended with the eruption of relentless social-media, text-messaging, tweeting and other digital forms of communication that further reduced, trivialized, and minimized verbal and visual communication, 4.) changing language (both verbal and visual) into lugubrious forms of Habermasean Neo-neoMarxist ‘communicative behavior,’ replete with ‘ideal speech communities,’ exploiting snappy acronyms, computer jargon, slang, emoticons, and idiomatic colloquialisms, condensing poetic syntax into glib ‘text-based’ slogans, tags, or pat catchphrases enveloped in favorite fonts, which placed mechanical design above both verbal and visual comprehension. By avoiding strong poetic and imaginative images, 5.) popular contemporary verbal and visual language, since 1970, nurtured increasing timidity (fear of others); glaring non-communication, ahistory, anti-imagination, dehumanization, violence for violence’s sake, and is, for the most part, less able to convey beauty, love, sublimity, feelings, emotions, or nous (thought-feelings). And, without its historic association with poetry, visual art has slid (throughout the early 21st Century) into a morass of “false Postmodernism,” consisting of entrenched hyper-neomodernism, inducing an anti-art malaise set on dehumanizing art by substituting paradoxes, irony, clever antics, and pranks as surrogates for art, affording merely a partial aesthetic that divulges only tiny “p-arts;” but, never the totality of art. From the 1970s onward, the elite within the contemporary art world (and its well-oiled institutions) clung to an array of anti-art dogma(s), which, over the last 40 years, encouraged the overuse of digital technology, almost identical to disgraced contemporary athletes, who abused steroids and growth hormones in order to synthetically enhance their talent. Thus, visual art became subservient to hyper-technology, and remained entrenched in eternal Neo-neoDada, Neo-neoconceptualism, as well as other 21st Century ironic styles, resembling and dissembling Duchampian/Beuysian/Kohian tongue-in-cheek antics, and pranks.
José Rodeiro. The Spirit of Cuba Favoring José Marti. oil-on-canvas, 2’ x 3.’ 1997. Rodeiro-art.com, accessed 5 May 2021.
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