The production and concerns of the artist from Valladolid are not easily labeled she is interested in creation per se and its processes and allows the general and particular context in which they arose to be fundamental, almost defining, in each of her projects trying to be as aware as possible of this circumstance. She is open to the use of all kinds of artistic resources that serve her intentions, she also seeks that the ways of exposing her work are part of that intentional device that begins with the idea.
She tends to attend to forms and contents that are not very defined, and difficult to recognize or categorize: she flees from the obvious and leads the viewer to that same terrain, trying to make enigmatic portions of reality her own rather than creating other new realities; she considers that it is not necessary, since the whole world is at our doorstep. Therefore, we can say that her trajectory’s motive is curiosity.
When she went through our Recorded section, and this was more than five years ago, Rodríguez told us about the broad and slippery foci of her creation: I am interested in many topics, even sometimes without being connected. I try to enhance my curiosity about things and free myself from ties. In each work, or body of work, I try to consider creation as if it were the first time, and, observing, I find constants, such as a concern for space and time, the very means of expression, the materiality of the work. I like to work with a specific project format, which is why each project usually starts from guidelines, from a context, to which I try to react very actively.
The close, although not explicitly, is the source of most of her proposals: Observing my environment and daily experience is important to me. I have lived in different countries and contexts in recent years, and each place has nurtured and shaped my ideas. There is not a day that I do not remember, for some reason, the six-month period that I lived in Japan in 2009. In classical Japan, a relationship with objects has left its mark on me.
His are normally hybrid works, halfway between sculpture and painting, in which he uses techniques typical of textile crafts from various countries in order to reflect on the survival of the traits traditionally associated with fabric design (that is, slow manual processing, the repetition of certain ornamental motifs) and claiming meticulous processing and the value of imperfections. A good part of its forms are inspired by nature, a metaphor for the author of the constant search for balance.
According to Belén, despite enjoying creative freedom in supposed growth, we tend to create useful and ornamental objects from repetitive patterns, from essential and reduced forms that have occurred, and continue to develop, in all cultures and at all times.
The forms inherent to nature, however, always arise from a confrontation of external and internal tensions, from the friction between one’s own atomic balance and temperature, humidity or pressure; D’Arcy Thompson said a century ago, in this sense, that the configuration of an object is a diagram of forces.
Starting next February 11, the Chapel of the Counts of Fuensaldaña and Room 9 of the Patio Herreriano Museum will host “Metallic Salt”, his second individual exhibition in this center after the one he presented there in 2018, after obtaining a scholarship from the Municipal Foundation of Culture of Valladolid.
If that monograph, which was titled “Paintung”, had painted as its axis, but it did not consist of canvases arranged on walls but of pieces located in the center of a room, canvases freed from their attachment to the wall and conceived as bodies in space, this next proposal will be articulated in a large installation but will delve into similar issues.
Rodríguez brings us a reflection on painting and color, again halfway between the static image and space: we will be able to see how, in his work, the exploration of everything related to the chromatic palette is developed according to singular formulas and in many different procedures.
Aware of the liquid nature that paints potentially houses and its possible tactile nature, she will work with folds and textures that will refer to baroque theatricality.
