“I paint things that no longer exist,” Francisco Rodriguez said. “It’s like the stars we see are dead – their light reaches us only after turning into dust.” He describes his practice simply: “I am painting dust – memories of places that no longer exist.”
Rodriguez’s paintings trace inner feelings through liminal spaces and sensory impressions that resist language: the smell of oranges, adolescent yearning, traces of a place that exists only in memory. For him, painting reconnects these lineages, not as fixed archives but as living impressions, constantly reinvented over time.
His reference points range from Japanese Edo period prints to Chinese horizontal landscape painting and the Flemish Renaissance tradition. These visual inheritances are reflected in his flattened compositions and muted color palette, evoking pastoral or dreamlike atmospheres: layers of cool blues and creams punctuated by primary colors of red and orange. Appearing in various states of rest and movement, contemporary figures drift through domestic scenes, acting less as protagonists than as incarnations of the subconscious.
Rodriguez’s solo exhibition at Baert Gallery, private nightmareexpands on these themes while introducing a darker emotional register shaped by today’s anxieties. In this new series of works, characters turn to analog devices, as if searching for an escape from the ruthlessness of contemporary media cycles. These paintings attempt to resolve the paradox that the tools used to connect us often leave us feeling more isolated and divided than ever.
Rodriguez expresses this ambivalence through moments of suspension between childhood and adulthood, interiority and public life, dependence and autonomy. He is drawn to the openness and mood swings of adolescence, qualities that reflect the wider uncertainty of contemporary life. His paintings allow fragility and ambiguity to remain translucent.
exist No mercy for fascismA teenage girl wears wired headphones and a T-shirt emblazoned with the word “ZERO,” a reference to the Smashing Pumpkins’ 1996 hit and Billy Corgan’s take on self-denial as a rebellious rejection of an imposed identity. This punk sensibility reverberates throughout the composition: a poster on the wall depicts a strangled snake with the words “No mercy for fascism” written next to it, while a shadow rises behind the girl, pointing in the opposite direction. Together, these factors present a tense tension between retreat and resistance, internal retreat and political rejection.
Rodriguez echoes this emotional expression by returning to the visual language of his youth, including hand-drawn Japanese animation, trading cards, and comics. Painting was fundamental to his creative process, giving the so-called “low” aesthetics the same legitimacy as the art historical tradition. Artists such as Aya Takano and Peter Doig were touchstones for its graphic lines and character-driven imagery.
For Rodriguez, the personal is political. Painting becomes a quiet form of resistance through a deliberate return to stillness in a moment of urgency and over-saturation. “I completely fell in love with painting,” he said. “To think that you can create an image out of just dust and oil. That’s a kind of alchemy to me.” Through its devotion to fragility and material processes, Rodriguez’s practice offers both a meditation on the past and a distillation of the present.
Other works such as Beast, Blackout; September 11, and guardian, The ominous, shadow-like dog is introduced to symbolize impending danger. For Rodriguez, these figures function both psychologically and formally: they are seen as expressions of anxiety while also asserting themselves as dominant visual forces. The dogs are rendered as dense black silhouettes, absorbing surrounding color into their void, transcending composition and disrupting spatial depth. Their piercing gazes gleam in the darkness, materializing emotional states into physical forms and making unease palpable.
private nightmare Inviting the viewer into a moment of pause, memory, adolescence and interiority slowly unfold, in stark contrast to contemporary culture’s rush to reflect. In Rodriguez’s hands, paintings carry fragile emotional records of past lives, contemporary chaos, and a tender promise that runs through both. –Sigourney Schultz
