Among the standouts was Old and New Dreams, in which a twisted snakeskin (filled out with bits of canvas and fabric and featuring a tiny leather strip protruding from one end like a tongue) is attached to the whitish-painted canvas along with an easy-to-miss seedpod-shaped piece of leather higher up. The snake overlays what looks to be a rendering of a sliced pomegranate, a seeming reference to the Garden of Eden. The composition also includes a painted branch with cobalt-blue and green leaves, as well as a painted border of school-bus yellow, purple and black—a good example of Rodriguez’s weird, alluring palette. Surrounding it all is one of the artist’s suitably ramshackle wood frames.
The snake was a recurring motif in the exhibition. A painted incarnation was seen in High Moods, a semiabstract landscape with a frayed rope and a rock notched into its frame. In Sound and Vision, which is as much an assemblage as a painting, a length of snakeskin is embedded in wax along with matches, elongated seedpods, dried flora and other materials.
A small hunk of concrete and a bit of red-painted wood, collaged at the center of South St. Marys, evoke a small house sitting on a horizon line. The form appears within an eye-shaped enclosure with rays emanating from it that conjures one of the all-seeing eyes of God common in medieval art. Jutting from the canvas is a semicircle of metal nails, which are all but invisible beyond a few feet away.
Rounding out the compact show were 30 graphite drawings hung salon-style—quickly executed renderings of everything from flowers and faces to airplanes and even dashes of erotica. While the drawings no doubt helped Rodriguez work through ideas, they have less of a presence than the expressive paintings. There is nothing grand or groundbreaking about those paintings, but they satisfy in their elusive and offbeat way.
