Rocío García and her visual codes

Rosa Eugenia García de la Nuez, or simply Rocío García, is without a doubt one of our most important contemporary artists. She graduated from the San Alejandro Academy in 1975 and from the Repin Academy in St. Petersburg in 1983. She has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in Havana, New York, Paris, Zurich and many other cities around the world.

El Gran chef (aka small chicken leg) is the title of her latest solo exhibition at El Apartamento Gallery, located at the corner of H and 15 in Havana’s Vedado neighborhood. It is an exhibition that approaches her latest production, presenting a series of works that, not for being new, are different from her symbolic and formal universe.

The primary objective of the visual arts is to seduce through the gaze, and Rocío García is an artist who knows this very well. Here we see how she uses exquisite compositions to engage with the viewer, and from there she proposes a series of deeply rooted problems in society.

Behind the curtain of «beautiful» forms lies a series of codes that underlie human life. Rocío García presents us with stories that are in dialogue with power relations, identity and gender conflicts.

This prolific creator has a wide knowledge of cinematography, because her work is just that, pure cinema, but of oil paintings and canvases. In this exhibition, she dominates the lights, the framing and the approaches with enormous ease, sometimes it seems that she is showing stills from a movie with an enormous load.

A transcendental element is the use of the human body, Rocío uses it here as a kind of reservoir, a space on which a series of ideas are deposited that will articulate the symbolic and formal discourse of the exhibition.

Her figures, sometimes decapitated, imprisoned or naked, are constantly metaphorically bombarding the viewer, because historically this has been one of the artist’s virtues: dialoguing with the public through her powerful visual proposals.

The curatorship of this exhibition is also an element worthy of recognition, since each of the pieces is placed in such a way that they seem like links in a great chain. Rocío García’s work also inspires this, an overwhelming formal and structural order.

Translated by Luis E. Amador Dominguez