1-Do you make a career out of or hope to make a career out of art, or is it a sideline for you?

I’ve been a computer systems analyst/programmer since 1976 and I’m also a mathematics tutor for high school and college students, but when I am with my friends and say that I am a programmer/mathematician/painter they correct me and say: "no, you are a painter/mathematician/programmer".

Please, don’t tell my boss.    

 2-What is it about your work that makes it speak to people or to the community at large?

I would rather ask the people.

 3-How do you let people know about your work?

I usually invite the people around me, people I know, to see my work on a one-on-one basis since I consider art to be an important part of a personal relationship. Then those people who get to see and enjoy my work tell others about it and hopefully it becomes a chain. I have also a site in www.artistamundo.com.

 4-What do you feel inspires you to make art in the particular medium you have chosen?

Who knows?

 5-Why Miami?

Why not Miami?.

 6-Do you have a favorite artist from the past or present?

Every single piece of art I have seen in my life has influenced me in one way or another. Every creator of a good piece is my favorite when I am in front of his/her work. Either a renamed master or just a high school student, if they are genuine, they become my favorite artist at that moment.

 7-How would you compare the art scene in Miami to other cities you have lived or worked in?

Art is part of the city’s environment, so art belongs to the city itself. No two cities are alike. I have seen good contemporary art here in Miami, as well as in New York, Paris, Mexico, Madrid and other cities as part of the city itself. I would say that art is an important part of the city’s soul. It is impossible to compare souls.

 8-If someone wanted to get into being an artist, what would be your first suggestion to them?

Be genuine. Create art for yourself and not for the public. That is what the public loves the most.

 Interviewer:

Annette Peikert

www.lifeisartfest.org

 About the exhibit HIDDEN VISIONS

Revealed Images

“Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible."

 Paul Klee, Creative Credo, 1920

The current Art Exhibit by artist Emilio Héctor Rodríguez at The Wirtz Gallery, invites the spectator to go beyond the images that our natural eyes offer us. Grouped with the title Hidden Visions, these recent works by the painter bring to our attention the need to refocus our point of view towards the beauty that underlies behind any surface. The photographs of different types of tissues -taken through a microscope- are, at the same time, the initial motive and inspiration for the pieces and a metaphor for all the spectrums of possible worlds, of different unexplored realities and dimensions of human existence.

 As is usual in his trajectory, Rodríguez bets on abstraction. In his individual, as well as group exhibits in which he has participated from 2008 until now, his language is characterized by recurring imaginative compositions, conceived through experimentation with colors and the non-figurative shapes he employs. In his dreamlike scenery/ landscape/ visions, time and space transcend the logic they are usually ruled by. A Mathematician by formal education, and thus a connossieur of the relativity of both concepts, the artist recreates a timeless world in which the elements float suspended and space is seen through chromatic gradations.

Timelessness, subversion of space, predominance of the monochrome, variety of different tones of the same color, blurred contours, ovoid shapes (ameboid?), rupture from the mimesis in the sense of the useless reproduction of the visible…These qualities are all constant in his production.

Hidden Visions incorporates, nevertheless, new shades to the interpretation. While the artist assumes as a starting point the images from the book Micro-Art: Art Images in a Hidden World (Lewis R. Wolberg, MD, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1970), the frontiers between abstraction and the figurative become blurred, flexible: of language  diametrically   opposed they turn into complementary, interchangeable no absolute. To Emilio Héctor            

abstractionism is not a pragmatic attitude; he does not go after a universal language or a pure form; he does not pursue to establish empathy between plastic forms and musical notes, nor does he try to give expression to the dictates of the surrealist psychic automatism. His art is about suggestions that penetrate things to describe them, to re-create them in their imagined composition.

 The expressiveness of color and the exploration of different gradations of one shade to another predominates his paintings. Color creates shapes, it builds the painting without having to appeal to a clear drawing. In the artist’s palette the reddish tones, green, orange, blue and violet are recurrent, usually worked in deep ranges, which bring out the focus of light through the use of transparencies and delicate touches of white in details in the painting  Hidden Vision. Most of the times the title acts as an agent provoking meaning: The beauty of chaos, Love in a mist,  or the different pieces inspired in the book Ecclesiastes, evoke an intellectual search that alternates between full freedom and the need for a formal accuracy, of an internal order within the work, even when not explicit.

The images that the artist transfers to the canvas come from a hidden world behind factual reality. They originate in the vertex where science and art meet to render evident the various communicative vessels between both knowledge fields. It was towards the end of the XIX century that investigations done in psychology, biology and other sciences started to reveal the narrow relationship between the visible and the invisible, the material and the spirit. Even though the symbolist movement became interested in exploring these issues and later on some important figures of the vanguard utilized some terms taken from biology and organic science to construct and explain their theories around art, the door towards a dialog is unfinished; it is still open.

Through this invitation, Hidden Visions becomes a window to the potential possibilities to discover our surroundings and ourselves.

Anelys Alvarez Muñoz

Master of Art in Art History, Havana University

Miami, 2011