The Caribbean as a mental space

"The painter Freddy Rodríguez was born in 1945 in Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic, and was exiled to New York fleeing Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, that exaggerated and bloodthirsty dictator who ended up buried in the Mingorrubio cemetery , in Madrid, where he is now accompanied by the corpse, or what remains of it, of Francisco Franco Bahamonde. Rodríguez, who died in Queens at age 76 from Lou Gehring's disease, looked like he had landed on Mars. The dominant cultural scene barely paid attention to Latin Americans. He began, at a very young age, painting Manhattan skyscrapers during his lunchtime from the job that guaranteed him bread. He cultivated other genres such as collage and sculpture, he used metal with canvas, earth, glass, sawdust. But his true love was geometric abstraction. In his period of maturity, he returned to the themes of the Caribbean with an inevitable point of reference, colonization. He did not ignore the immigrant experience, the tension of arriving in a strange place with your customs on your back, nor the sexual scandals of the Catholic Church . He expressed the racism he suffered through color and shapes. He paid tribute to the living, also to the dead. He erected an outdoor monument to remember those who died in an American Airlines plane crash bound for the Dominican Republic, which occurred just after takeoff from JFK. There it is still, a curved wall on which the names of the victims are engraved. When it was his time, Rodríguez was considered by critics as an American artist, that kind of visa that is granted to talent but is hidden from everyday life."

March 2, 2024