My work is certainly metaphorical and symbolic, and metaphors often have profound conceptual value

Dagoberto Rodríguez

The tunnel is in itself a polyphony of meanings, a polysemy which symbolizes all the dark, anxious, painful crossings or expectations that can lead to another life. Meticulously executed, the watercolors are of a monumental scale. This medium requires letting go while striking a balance between control and freedom of the gesture. Watercolour is the medium of choice for text illustration, from Egyptian or medieval manuscripts. Immersive, these drawings catch the eye, as if you could pass to the other side of the mirror or get sucked in. They only become even more credible thanks to tenfold illusionist effects that encourage this transition to another world. Dagoberto Rodríguez creates ultra-contemporary and urban narratives of a mechanical, cold and dehumanized world bathed into an electric light … A kind of outside world, closed in itself, enigmatic, without landmarks and of which we do not know if it is dreamlike, dystopic or concrete.

Tunnels and corridors are covered and dark communication paths with no clear location, leading us through the darkness from one area of light to another. They convey the image of the irreversible, the trial or of the passage from one state to another. At the end of each tunnel, a door symbolizes its infinite nature. The tunnel is the illusion of perspective, its emblem, according to Alberti’s definition of the painting as an open window to the world. Within the epic painting, the whole enigma of the world and the history of painting is at stake. It also alludes to today’s racing games on our smartphones or to virtual reality, to all these windows and multiple screens that suck us into information tunnels.

In the heart of the corridor, we are between two indistinct spaces, as in transit, with no possibility to escape. While they may seem unlimited, these tunnels still hold us prisoners. Are those tunnels embodying the prison of our knowledge or of our certitudes? They have a false horizon. Wandering towards the light at the end of the tunnel as in Plato’s cave, we do not know if we will come across the exit or if it is only the light towards the next corridor that guides us. It appears that those tunnels generate feelings of claustrophobia, stagnation, insecurity and perhaps also frustration. They represent the emblem of the contemporary world where all our dogmas have been overthrown and where we do not know where we are going. To quote Milan Kundera in Identity: “I would imagine life before me like a tree. I used to call it the tree of possibilities. We see life that way for only a brief time. Thereafter, it comes to looking like a track laid out once and for all, a tunnel one can never get out of.” Foucault had already spoken in Discipline and Punish of “conceptual dungeons of incarceration”. Those tunnels also refer to Cuba’s endless history, whose future directions cannot be predicted. The son of a keen astronomer, Rodríguez grew up in Cuba in a socialist environment, a “communist science fiction”, “a failed utopian state”, to quote him. From Cuba’s limited access to technology, he inherited a kind of “Robinson Crusoe syndrome”. Having to do things by himself, step by step, through recycling and inventive resourcefulness has been his way to find a new language of expressive system. Maybe that’s why all his architectural fantasies are built in Lego, a game with elementary principles and rules. Then, the Legos bricks could be disassembled, deconstructed or agglomerated to new blocks to expand at any time, like a huge construction site. This Lego world can also collapse at any moment as Cuba’s communist utopia. It is also the image of the extreme fragility of today’s world of images and information, where no construction is solid anymore.

The arsenal of objects that we interact with everyday holds huge symbolic potential for my narratives. […] Architecture is also an object, capable of generating a language and expression

Dagoberto Rodríguez