PINTURAS DEL AYER Y DEL MAÑANA título que reúne una serie de obras de René Francisco Rodríguez, realizadas en diferentes etapas por el artista. Expone así su parecer acerca de la producción pictórica, una especie de teoría particular que defiende el concepto de la pintura como oficio o medio de expresión que ha existido y existirá dentro de las variadas prácticas artísticas.

La muestra Antecomienzo reúne a claros exponentes de la generación que tuvo a su cargo «reinventar» el arte cubano en la pasada década (Abel Barroso, Aimée García, Luis Gómez, Ibrahim Miranda, Carlos Montes de Oca, Sandra Ramos, Fernando Rodríguez, René Francisco Rodríguez, Lázaro Saavedra y Osvaldo Yero). Poco podemos decir que no haya sido ya dicho acerca de ellos; sí podemos, no obstante, enunciar nuevos puntos de contacto, delinear territorios de encuentro entre sus propuestas, tan diversas como fecundas.

Solo show

Se entiende que René Francisco interpreta de muchas maneras, como si su accionar le permitiese cubrir de un golpe varias acepciones de verbo tan expansivo. Por una parte, no hay dudas de que él concibe y expresa la realidad “de un modo personal” (de ello dan fe centenares de obras pintadas, dibujadas, instaladas, ensambladas, grabadas en matrices gráficas y en cintas de vídeo).

Group Show

René Francisco, Manuel Piña, Liudmila & Nelson y Glauber Ballesteros

Group Exhibition and Symposium at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Canada, exploring the relationship between contemporary art practice and the emerging field of community based research.

From January 30 to May 24, 2009

Showing the videoworks Agua Benita and A la ca(sz)a de Rosa

Workshop with students

January 24 - February 5

At the location of Window Project, Cuban artist Rene Francisco Rodriguez works with students from the Vancouver Island School of Art to create a series of work that explores the theme of "shelter."

No más soldados continúa un procedimiento análogo al que ha venido siguiendo René Francisco en su serie de pinturas-pantallas: reproducir en el lienzo una fotografía algunas veces personal, otras no necesariamente y vaciar alguna porción de su superficie, para proyectar sobre ella imágenes que, en algún modo, permitan al artista comentar algún fenómeno o situación mediante la contraposición y el enfrentamiento de referentes: los del lienzo y los de la proyección.

Personal Exhibit

Screening of his trilogy of new videoworks

Proyecto Palitos is a project based on the circumstances surrounding the organization of the masses during parades, demonstrations and commemoratives events in the Plaza de la Revolucion, Havana. To mark these events, vast numbers of people are brought in from the city’ s outskirts, pupils from schools in the countryside, scholarship students, and labour organizations, in order to guarantee mass attendance.

Taller de Insercion Social. Can Xalant

Killing Time, curated by Elvis Fuentes, Yuneikys Villalonga, and Glexis Novoa, focuses on the work of over seventy contemporary Cuban artists that have approached the subject of time. “The Revolution has been a symbolic intervention on Cuban Time. In return, time has shaped discourses of and on the Cuban Revolution,” said curators. Time patterns: Rewriting History, Productive Journey vs. Free Time: From Diversion to Subversion, and Aging and Decaying: An Archaeology of Utopia, are some of many subjects explored in different media, including performances, installations, photographs, videos, drawings, paintings, sculpture, murals, prints and ephemera. This exhibition spans from late 1970s to the present, and provides a timely context for Cuban artists whose work has had little or no exposure in the United States. Many of these artists have metaphorically recorded some of the tensions in the cultural, social and political landscape of the past three decades, and have often been dismissed by the official discourse on the Island or stereotyped by narrow conceptions of identity. A special section of the exhibition features the origins of Performance and Conceptual art in Cuba, through original works and documentation materials never before shown in the United States. In addition to the exhibition, this show will include extensive public programming and a catalogue.

Patio de Nin (Nin’s Backyard) is part of a trilogy I have been working on since April 2003 when I started a survey to help several persons who live in extremely difficult conditions in a poor neighborhood of Havana: El Romerillo.

The project Buena Vista Interchange goes on with my series of works I devoted to myself as an artist in poor neighborhoods of Havana city. From several years ago I have developed social projects as an important zone of my work. I began working with this as part of a pedagogical work that I named From a Pedagogical Pragmatic, in which my students and I went to share experiences with the inhabitants of an old building in Old Havana. We ask them to tell us their wishes concerning housing improvements and for free I tried to make it real. Several years ago, in 2003, going on with that social work that my students of the Instituto Superior de Arte and I have done in 1990, began working at a depressing neighborhood of Havana called El Romerillo.

Benita Rivera is an old lady who lives in an alley of the 60 Street between 19 and 21, Municipality of Playa. The roof of her small house has been damaged for many years and has serious troubles with filtrations so the rainy seasons have terrible consequences for all Benita’s belongings: household furnishings, appliances, many of them lost because of this situation. Benita is retired; this and her illness (rheumatism) make her life to elapse in the interior of her home. She earns her living ironing clothe. I used to wash, but the lack of water in this alley has limited my possibilities. Is a hard problem, it is not easy; water comes every other day and I barely have where to store it.

The exhibition Pasta Cortada continues Francisco’s interest in the exploration of the relationship between the individual and society, and between art and politics. The title of the exhibition, Pasta Cortada is an allusion to the way in which a homogeneous mass such as bread dough is kneaded into shape and then chopped (cortada) into different parts.

Exhibition of the installation Gradas during Mattres Factory Residence.

En su totalidad el evento reunió propuestas artísticas site-specifics en espacios públicos y semi-públicos concebidos a partir del agua como tema, como materia prima del arte, como metáfora y en sus especificidades desde diferentes visiones socio-culturales y contextos nacionales o regionales.

Además, vinculó arte e industria desde una perspectiva ecológica.

Casa de las Américas. metal based - Installations and video projections

René Francisco´s art is closely linked with the community in which he lives and works. He teaches at the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana, and collaborates with his students on art projects. These projects often take place in the streets or in shopping centres instead of museums or galleries. Without being glum, his art carries a strong message and deals with issues that concern Cuban society. Francisco´s considers it especially important to be able to work in Cuba.

René Francisco Rodríguez´s installation, Y, illustrates the well-known condition of finding ourselves forced to make a choice in life: the crossroads, the moment of doubt before deciding which road to take and which to exclude. Crossing a sort of corridor, we find ourselves between two walls composed of automobile tyres with larger tyre at the center forming a sort of well.

Más que a un ejercicio lógico-hermenéutico (como reclaman casi todas las obras de la bienal) este artista nos somete a una experiencia estética de alta intensidad, en la que los procesos racionales del pensamiento se mezclan con las actitudes surrealizantes, conformando las redes inescrutables de a creación. R. F. Rodríguez aporta las claves para convertir a cada espectador en un psicoanalista. La acción de reparar, más que recomponer supone reconocer. El artista nos ofrece una instantánea de su mundo interior. No se trata en este caso ce reparar los objetos sino de reparar en los objetos salvados de la desmemoria. Mas que íntima, es una pieza encefalográfica.

Performance “Malevi bobo, papá bobo”.
Materiales varios, música, luz, Caramelos, dimensiones variables

Cumpleaños de mi hija celebrado durante la exposición.
45 minutos de interacción con las obras y con mi hija Alicia.
El performance finaliza con la fiesta de cumpleaños dentro de la exposición.