Booth P10
For The Armory Show 2023, Charles Moffett is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by Salinas, CA-born, now New York-based artist José De Jesús Rodríguez. The solo presentation follows Rodríguez’s recent inclusion in the gallery’s summer 2023 group exhibition Genius Loci, as well as a two-artist exhibition featuring work by Rodríguez alongside Esteban Ramón Pérez in spring 2022.
The presentation gathers together five new works, showcasing the artist’s embrace of fresco painting — a form of painting in which pigments are applied directly on fresh, wet, lime plaster. Drawing upon the long tradition of fresco ranging from early Italian Renaissance to Mexican muralists, Rodríguez deftly integrates fresco with acrylic, oil, and airbrush painting into unified compositions. Each material demands a different touch and speed of application, complicating notions of the “time” possessed within the painting itself — certain passages move slowly at an almost dream-like pace, while others pass swiftly with open, loose marks made in expansive space.
For this new body of work, Rodríguez has drawn compositional inspiration from personal photographs and memories, as well as found, anonymous images sourced from magazines, the internet, and social media. With this range of visual sources as a loose beginning point, the painter allows a serendipitous, intuitive approach to drive the compositions — never a direct reproduction of an image, but an imagined amalgamation of different geographies, spaces, plants, animals, figures, and objects. The paintings exist not within a surreal plane, but one where the social and the real intersects with the dream. There’s a tender rawness and vulnerability coursing through the scenes, yet one senses an undercurrent of violence, force, and conflict swelling to the surface. For Rodríguez, meaning, history and identity are inherently multitudinal, and his paintings unearth the poetry within that dissonance, the beauty within the ambiguity.
José de Jesús Rodríguez (b. 1991, Salinas, CAl lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) received his BFA from University of California, Santa Cruz in 2013, and his MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University School of Art in 2020, following a summer residency at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2017. Rodríguez has been the subject of solo and two-artist exhibitions at Charles Moffett in New York, NY and GAVLAK Gallery in Los Angeles, CA. His work has been featured in group exhibitions at Charles Moffett, New York, NY, Company Gallery, New York, NY and Richard Heller Gallery, Los Angeles, CA.