RODRIGO MÉNDEZ

Rodrigo Méndez is an internationally acclaimed Colombo-Panamanian visual artist. His work has been showcased in Colombia, Panamá, Mexico, Spain and The United States

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"In times of social networks, parallel universes and a virtuality that is increasingly fused with reality, we find ourselves immersed in an avalanche of images literally within reach of our hands. The mobile unit, the tablet and the laptop take on a leading role in the way we connect with visual culture. Under this paradigm, the work of Rodrigo Méndez is projected as a bridge between academic tradition and digital contemporaneity.

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His creative experience has ranged between audiovisual production and easel painting, an experience that was enhanced from his studies at the Faculty of Visual Arts of the Javeriana University of Bogotá, where his balance tended towards the creation of animations based on images painted on paper, brought to life through digital animation. In fact, his first outstanding work was "Florina", an animated short from 2016, which the following year won him the award for best animation at the Premios Latinos Festival in Marbella (Spain), the highest prize at the nineteenth version of the Festicine Kids of Cartagena (Colombia), as well as distinguished participations in the Independent Film Festival of Elche (Spain), and in the Cartagena Film Festival.

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This important meeting between the digital and the analog in art, prompted him to resume and enhance a pictorial idea, taking the pixel and overlap it with physical reality:

defragmenting the color stains into reticular chromatic units, crating a figure that reminds us of a digital image on a computer screen.

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Thematically, his preference for the very academic human figure enhances the paradoxical relationship between virtual and face-to-face reality, bringing to the board and the canvas an experience usually linked to an electronic device."

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- Curatorial text written by Reinier Rodriguez Ferguson