What can art say? Sometimes, a message that we all need to hear.

Gold Twist by Miguel Rodez

What can art say? Read the artist's statement of Miguel Rodez for a  message that is just as beautiful as his work. Rodez has an exhibit which opened today in Miami Fl.  

In his artist statement, Rodez verbally describes a world that many of us rarely see in our daily lives. While in Cuba, I  saw the student artists creating art at the Art Institute of Cuba, I visited the studios of many well known Cuban artists and I studied the murals throughout the streets of Cuba.  Embodied within each piece of art, I could hear a message similarly to Rodez's message. The only difference was the message I heard was trapped within Cuba's borders. The artwork I saw was censored, relying on abstract symbolism as a replacement for "shouting" to the world.  A world that due to politics may fails to ever hear the Cuban artist's visual "words." 

Art can say a lot. Do not just look at art, listen to the message that the artist is whispering in your ear.  You just may discover that you and the artist are linked together in more ways than one.

MIGUEL RODEZ  ARTIST’S STATEMENT

When not creating art, my work relates to human rights issues.  Like art, the human rights field is an endeavor that is near and dear to my heart.  Some are able to glean how my career choice percolates into my artwork.  In my painting series Imagining Liberation for example, I delve into the world of daydreams from the perspective of people who feel trapped in some way.  In a sense, we are all trapped at one time or another, if not always.  The constrictions that we endure may be physical, political, religious, laboral or social.  It doesn’t matter.  It is the dream that interests me – the aspiration of freedom; the point where at least one link of the chain that binds the dreamers breaks and leads to the hope of liberation.  I manipulate negative elements associated with repression – a chain – and turn it into a positive concept – freedom – by breaking it.  Because I am representing a dream and not manufacturing a chain one could find at a wharehouse, the links that I produce cease to be the gripping darkness that chains symbolize and become magically sensual organic forms that no longer look or behave like a real chain.  Such usage of negative and positive elements seeps into even some of my most abstract work.  Although some may find my output subjectively attractive, my objective is not to create pretty things to match anyone’s couch, but to entice people think about their lives, about the world that we live in and about what can be done to achieve the inner liberation that we all crave deeply though we may choose to supress for the sake of conformity.