Press dossier
G.Rodilla’s transformed reality
Gregorio Rodilla ‘s unorthodox compositions knock first of all by their unconventional aspect of the presentation of the plans which structure them. It is necessary to say also that the Catalan looks rather for the hidden face of things, unless happens the bard of a reality transformed in his way. That is why it is never evident to know where we are situated, what is to the right, to the left, either at the top either below.
Surfaces are made by reflections which stress directions perfectly improbable, what still contributes to divert the glance. And some signs or deformed objects which appear here and there in this strange maze are far from bringing some rationality to the rules of the game. It is about a difficult painting, which can please if we find keys to drill its mystery.
N.T.L. Ouest France. (Nantes, 27/10/2008)
Gregorio Rodilla is a figurative painter. Figurative painter of a strange figurative, confused, airy, winding and sad images; sad melancholies coloured by the time by a distant, very distant, more distant than the time that implies having been lived, at least consciously lived.
You, you are not a grocer, I told him I one day. "No, but I use the fruits as references for my paintings". The work of my friend Gregorio evokes fruit, vegetables, plants and it turns into a still life which is alive, mobile, worried. That is why is painting means expressive or expressionist with allusions to Bacon, Clifford Still or to John Fautrier and Dubuffet... in terms of the matter.
The work of Gregorio Rodilla is wrapped up in a mysterious fantasy halo. His images are overwhelmed in the secret of an infinite space where he depicts clearly in its iconography the struggle of opposites.
Abstraction-figurative-vitality and a dreamy lethargy are in opposition, not only in their exposure and uncovering themselves but also fighting. His work gives us the internal struggle between despair for life and an idea of death. Not the struggle for life, but desperate struggle for life in front of alienation and necrosis of death.
J. M. Garayo.
(Madrid, 03-08-2006)
Gregorio Rodilla "The complex simple things"
I've known Gregorio Rodilla at his exhibition in the Centre of art contemporary Bouvet-Ladubay. Our conversation was fluid and warm. His French with a light focus of a man coming from the South has made our relationship more forthcoming.
As I visited the exhibition halls, I was trying to see the relationship between the artist, a simple and direct contact man and his work, complex and mysterious.
His paintings, most of them of a large size, were landscapes, still-lives, tributes to music (to see, the small beautiful painting on Vivaldi)... As he explained to me later, "Along our life, the hidden things side is always present the true and its opposite, the real and imagination which is as real." "The simplicity of things is always complex". I have seen what he wanted to show: the mystery hidden and complex of everyday life.
This explains why cuts and different plans in the composition of his paintings. The mystery of the hidden works from this set of mirrors (they transform reality without distortion) that the artist uses as appeal throughout the development of his work.
Nothing is free. Pasting employment and different materials allow the artist to free in the search for what he calls "serenity in creating" which is nothing but the use of the means to achieve the realization of an objective: the subjective vision of our daily lives. Understandably seeing how it uses the collage. His work comes from there, the collage: it uses it as a simple support as "pigment" manipulating colour already pre-approved, or simply in the classic concept: paper pasted as a reference in which the spectator can direct his gaze.
But the collage at Gregorio Rodilla is complicated even more by mixing different layers of paint and other materials to give to his work this quality that transmits anxiety and mystery.
Gregorio Rodilla explained to me that he likes working on wood. As it is a rigid material, it can "manipulate" materials with more freedom. He considers that canvas is more fragile and that it is lighter: manipulation is less spontaneous. Basically, he considered a craftsman who works with materials and colours and one of the great pleasures is this artisanal manipulation.
Last spring, I visited his studio of Anjou. We talked about his work, but also something that he is fond of perhaps more than painting: literature. It is always pleasant to exchange literary; discoveries and that is what we have done: exchange information about the latest.
When I left, I could not help but think about her latest paintings. His work became plastically much more complex, but he had eliminated elements that could disrupt its objective: the vision of the hidden. I believe that the path was plotted.
Max A. Giffrez
(Paris, 2003)
RODILLA MAKES AN EXHIBITION AT BOUVET-LADUBAY’S CONTEMPORARY ART CENTRE
He likes the games of mirrors to represent the real and imagined thing, the real and what is immaterial, the said, and the unsaid.
Spanish painter Gregorio Rodilla, who shares his life and his work between his studio in Barcelona and the other one in Anjou exhibits 30 paintings (mainly of large formats) at the contemporary Bouvet-Ladubay Centre.
The artist has chosen, since always, to follow a very personal path in the representation of his inspiration subjects: On the same canvas he shows the hidden reality, inviting the spectator to extend its work through the imaginary. With this important exhibition, Gregorio Rodilla is the right reward of a large and slow maturation work
La Nouvelle République (08/10/2001)
RODILLA OR THE DAILY MISTERIES
He speaks about himself as a “manipulator” who likes mixing materials and supports.
Impossible to be more Castilian than Gregorio Rodilla, Spanish painter born in Salamanca. He has been living for a long time in Barcelona, in this Catalonia which saw some of the greatest painters of the Iberian Peninsula. He has been living in Paris during a few years to feed himself of French influences. As a matter of fact he has bought a little house in Anjou where he lives and works part of the year.
The artist, very free-style describes his inner world, his emotions of living, creating very personal paintings. They are all the more personal than Rodilla mix the supports at his leisure: paper (preferably advertising pieces) and the fabric with oil, his usual technique: "I am a manipulator; I like to mix materials and supports".
Rodilla painted daily, life, his passions: Theatre, still-lives, music of Vivaldi and Brahms; everything is a pretext to be filled with wonder. And there are things he does not find to understand: "For my pasting I use written posters in foreign languages that I even don't understand myself." This allows to make our mind evade itself. "I am interested by one thing and its dark side. I like mirrors, mysterious spaces". His paintings have this duality: says and the unsaid, the clear and dark , the order and the diffuse: "any object, everyone has always a dark side." I use it every time. "And I divide these two worlds by a line, a space, a cut".
His paintings give an impression of heat. Nothing of this minimal coldness (exception for a table, perhaps) which is the prerogative, even the torch of a few contemporary creators.
B. Gilet (03/10/2001)
GREGORIO RODILLA or The ART of PERCEPTION and the UNVOICED COMMENT
The contemporary Bouvet-Ladubay Art Center organizes the first great exhibition in Maine ET Loire Gregorio Rodilla.
The real without its opposite
The artist’s approach is based on the representation of the truth and its mystery which must not be seen here as a lie, Rodilla insists. This is the yin and the yang "but not the white and the black ", continues the artist.
The line is always showed
Technically, Gregorio Rodilla likes handling the material which he puts in superimposed layers. The collage is systematically present, hidden under the contribution of materials or, on the contrary, very forward, vector of the glance, in a manipulation of the colours of papers. The green always tinged with a point of orangy colour and the colours of the earth have his preferences in the colour chart. The line, often vertical, is a constant in his works. Synonym for border between the visible and the imagined, the truth and its deformed version.
It is always the same progress he works since the seventies. If he creates "outside Landscape", it is necessary to send back its opposite in "Inside of a landscape". The mirror is his game.
Today, he purifies even more the painting. His "Tree of Cléré" is a significant representation. The minimalism settles down and even the collages have lost their papers. Bring nothing of excess which can pollute the reading itself of the work. Go to the main part and, in a rather cold way, let the spectator dread the work and question it
Bruno Jeoffroy (05/10/2001)
GREGORIO RODILLA BETWEEN BARCELONA AND ANJOU
He has installed his brushes in Saint-Georges-sur-Layon, while continuing to create with passion in Barcelona. Rodilla is an angevin spanish painter. But first of all spanish..
How to be an architect in Barcelona, the beautiful Catalan city forever marked by the track of the anticonformist and generous Gaudi? Perhaps until 18 or 20 years, Gregorio Rodilla, after a long immersion at the University of Salamanca, his hometown, did not think about the issue. He studied architecture, which he even taught.
But it is passion, the fiery passion of the painting-generic term whose outlines are too blurry that kept Gregorio Rodilla, emotionally affected by the cubism of Picasso and by the technical freedom of Velázquez. Was it a sole revelation?
If the famous Spanish painters have dug a few promising paths in Gregorio Rodilla’s pathways, they have not clipped on the part of the pure creation of this Castilian, always inspired by his own vision of the transfiguration of the real in art.
The question of any membership to a "school of painting", or even of a strong reference to a "master" seems to be so strange to the eyes of the artist quite proud of his total independence that it would ultimately be preposterous. Wild freedom of creation which comes along, in this case, with modesty not feigned: the artist of Salamanca, Inhabitant of Barcelona and Inhabitant of Anjou by adoption, just recognizes some gifts for the "manual" works!
Painting and literary movement
But don’t be wrong. Whether he is in his studio of Barcelona, in the heart of the noisy city, or in his French refuge, Gregorio Rodilla carries out, for twenty five years, day after day, a work of parturition similar to that of the writer in front of the blank page. A route marked out by slow evolutions which made him pass of the status of " painter of the inside " in that of " painter from the outside
We can always see, in most of Rodilla’s works, this age-old Spanish soul, a bit dark, tortured, among which the philosopher and the poet Miguel de Unamuno was able to be supposed to be for the winged parangon, and in which the generations sacrificed by Dictator Franco’s era were able to recognize themselves!
But in the tragic feeling of the life developed by Unamuno, Rodilla also sets in these works the gush of the life. There is always in the "insides" as in "outsides" of the painter, a sheaf of lines in the lively colours which offer a more optimistic reading of the mythical Don Quijote of Cervantès there.
It is true as well that Gregorio Rodilla is of his generation. Moulded by Spanish and French culture, he took a way parallel to that of the current literary movement of his country, the movement which sees a numerous young talents recognized in Spain.
Although he has exhibited his paintings in several Parisian galleries, in Nice or in Belgium, after Madrid or Barcelona, Rodilla remains however discreet, in search of the only "serenity" to work fervently.
It remains to be seen whether some art lover from Anjou will dare one day to push the white gate of his studio to give to see this singular glance which a Catalan puts for twenty five years on the others, without ever denying anything of what it is.
Alain Mariez (Aôut, 1995)
"Landscape Reflections" in the exhibition of Gregorio Rodilla
Under the title "Study on a landscape", Gregorio Rodilla makes an exhibition at the Gallery Varron his last work as continuation of a work presented in 1989 with the use of the collage(sticking) as the support and pigment to which he adds some material in some of his paintings.
The main object of this exhibition is the landscape, with a clear dominant of the green in almost all the paintings except for "The man in the blue pants". "This dominant almost absolved from the green colour is not influenced by the subject, but appears unconsciously. I use this colour with very sweet tones, and as compensation I use orangy tones, ocres, and yellow" asserts Gregorio Rodilla.
In an unreal space, the artist takes elements of the landscape, as trees, vegetation and atmosphere, in an atmosphere of mystery, result of the elements which do not join a concrete reality. "I always use the mystery and the hidden as central axis of the work, even when I paint more concrete subjects as portraits".
Sensation
"All my paintings follow an evolution of plans and spaces without having to define them in real objects but as sensations. They are reflections of landscapes inside the picture with which I make a success of a shape of break which unifies the plastic piece" adds the painter.
The exhibition consists of 11 works of big size as fundamental premise "to develop the landscape" and where we observe the division of the painting which draws profoundly the attention. In some cases, the painter separates in two different parts, and in the others it is the line which bounds the spaces in which he develops his creation.
José F. Merino (Abril, 1992)
Gregorio Rodilla's mysterious landscapes
When it passes by Gregorio Rodilla's brushes, the inside of a landscape is converted in some thing mysterious. The painter uses in his creations a mixed technique on base of collage. All his paintings are so disturbing as they leave nobody indifferent
Even if the elements which he uses in his works are as well universal as a tree can be , Rodilla manipulates them to surround them with mystery. Although they do not claim to deliver of message, his landscapes are not a faithful copy of the reality.
"They are studies on internal and outer landscapes. In any landscape, there is always a hidden part, something mysterious. Maybe it is what I want to pass on; my wish is that the spectator tries to penetrate into the work ", explains his author. However, Gregorio Rodilla considers that his works are relaxing at the same time as disturbing.
His landscapes do not translate faithfully the reality. "It is about my own internal re-creations. Every work is a real adventure. Sometimes I leave an abstract idea or a simple sketch".
Although to begin painting, the support is not necessarily something fundamental, the technique yes, is it. "it is all the same to me to paint on paper, wood or on the painting, but what pleases me is that there is some material". In all the paintings there are compositions on base of collage. "I use paper posters or other printed supports which I mix with my own painting and I make use of their colours and texture that I mix with my own ones".
Susana Asenjo (03/04/1992)
The work of Gregorio Rodilla returns to Salamanca.
Today we inaugurate in the Gallery Varron an exhibition of Gregorio Rodilla's recent work. It is already the second time that he exposes in this gallery, although he has been eight years since the first exhibition, time being enough for allowing us to judge the evolution of this painter.
Gregorio Rodilla was born in Salamanca. He studied architecture that he has never exercised to focus entirely on painting. It has set his residence in Barcelona after 4 years living in Paris.
In his recent work, Rodilla uses unmixed technique, fundamentally the collage, based on paper and canvas, it adds oil and sometimes pastel, which guarantees a thick texture, which characterizes his work.
Gregorio Rodilla runs the collage all the possibilities that offers this technique to him. He uses it as support, as pigment, as element of texture and creator of spaces. He considers that this collage which is particular to him is not free, because it gives him plastic possibilities that it would not manage to obtain with the other techniques. It is the reason for which Gregorio Rodilla, considers his work as "atypical" and assures to be divided up in no concrete school.
His paintings answer an appropriate creative concept of a self-taught which wants to go out of himself, remote from any tendencies which could influence him. It is for it that we can see in Rodilla a pure creator whose capacity is reflected in a work different from what we can see generally everywhere
Despite appearances, his paintings are very elaborate. It finds them something concrete and leaves nothing to improvisation or random. It does with stubbornness and toughness. He works his work as a craftsman with a meticulous in order to achieve something different dedication reflecting concrete lines of easy identification, has a plastic personal concept and a particular understanding of the art form. For him, painting is before a risk and an adventure as well as for those who, as Gregorio Rodilla, claim to be part of a school or storing in a any trend.
‘ Exposure that today ' he inaugurates in Varron’s , where are stuck 19 canvases mixed on wood, an homogeneous range of conscientious work which is a clear reflection of what Gregorio Rodilla tends to , of what he is and has been since his last exhibition 8 years ago in this same Gallery.
J.A.G.
La Gaceta (26/05/1989)
"The power of mystery in the known”
Gregorio Rodilla's work passes on to the spectator a hidden, mysterious world. His paintings reflect the face hidden from things. An object, a detail have another meaning than that of the simple glance; we can find a new vision. His paintings allow us to glimpse, to imagine, to transform the reality, by looking for the dark side, for the hidden face, for the mysterious glance there.
With intimate, warm tones, he likes tones earth and ochre, he transports us in the discovery of a new reality. The painting passes on heat, local. In a picture, a face in the shadow fills with intentions, with expectations, with mysterious reality. The suspense of the former poster, the hope of a hair in front of a mirror, the faded magnificence of a damaged bulb, everything in the work collides us, allows us to glimpse the brightness, to enter another halo. To give more bombast to what is exposed in the intuition, in the secret game of the shadows and the lights,
Gregorio Rodilla began this pictorial adventure in the 1970s, after having studied architecture. His artistic path led him to move from Madrid to Barcelona, where he began to come into contact with France and that is at this time that he decided to go live in Paris. Therefore he lived and worked in the two countries.
"I paint every day although I don’t have a rigid schedule." The creation, being self-taught, capture the essence of the movement of the object, to find each time the freshness, watch with new eyes and discover that everything is not always seen in advance; that is not because we know by heart an object that it has lost its faculty of surprise, that we can’t find a new meaning. It is in all this that I find the perfect material to work "Gregorio Rodilla is limited not only to painting." When talking with him, we find his fascination for film, photography and literature. Delights in the literary work: the creation of characters, situations, the powers of seduction intuitive drive, which creates its own characters, its own space, its design. He
Recognizes himself big reader, always accompanied by a book in his travels or during his nights of insomnia.
The art as the total approach of the reality
"The picture, the painting, the work is alive when it is put and not exposed, when it is incorporated to somebody’s life, when it is a part of its life and when begins the feeling of property"
Ana. I. Maestro (Junio, 1989)
RODILLA develops his painting very well, the structure as well and he composes with rigour, returns to the qualities of oil, like plastic values. The life of inner light, which comes from the table, as in our best classic works but with current incentives, is one of his constants. As well as his obsession for well defined plans, by suggesting inside and depths, spaces in which he places and orders the forms and the volumes of his art, sometimes remind of distant surrealist motivations.
It is possible at the moment to find in his work some relations with tendencies still current of the art of our time and which were in increase during the last decades, concerns or nostalgias for a delicious art, structured in a purified way.
We do not doubt that he will succeed in defining himself while throwing back what embarrasses him. We can already notice it in some of the drawings and the paintings of this coherent and in any case important exhibition presented in the Canem art Gallery, one of the first ones of this author of such an amplitude and a transcendence.
Gonzalo Puerto (Enero, 1979)
Gregorio Rodilla exhibits in the Canem art Gallery a work which postpones currents which we usually see in other exhibitions.
For this occasion it shows us a young painter from Salamanca who lives in Barcelona and makes his first exhibition in Castellón.
In Gregorio Rodilla’s work, we see a marked concern which gives coherence to the work by the structures and composition of plans. Here he plays with recesses, lights, spaces, each time, ordering forms and volumes, to suggest a predesigned idea full of interiorities and depths art.
Rodilla’s paintings, whether or not it pleases the general public, can’t be ignored, if we don’t want to turn our backs on what happens outside our borders. It is part of our contemporary history current painting.
Beatriz Guttmann (16/01/1979)
The serene tranquillity in the work of Gregorio Rodilla
Gregorio Rodilla is a young painter who makes his entry to this complex world "to show what he makes" with his directory of works of a serene and firm execution, with particular subjects: objects, paintings, clothes forms after all which suggest more than they show really. Suspended, volatile figures, submerged in allegorical intentions.
He makes the presentation of his exhibition with the sentence of V. Van Gogh: "we shall never know how to say what contains us, what surrounds us, what appears to bury us, but we feel, however, I do not know which barriers, which bars, which walls".
Through these words is a part of the key of Gregorio Rodilla's work. Landscapes cut, destroyed by the space or the object which their existence left and which are lying by occupying the grateful space. Realities - Almost all have a mission, to cover - empty or prostituted, eager for movement to conquer the space and the motive, to show their service and the reality.
Gregorio Rodilla-'s works we have already said it enjoy peace of mind, wait as if the movement had to result from sensations which they start by their modification. Sensations which submerge us in his work which make us participating in it actively.
After all, we are in front of a young painter who, boss of the drawing, released from schools and academies, knows perfectly the importance which contains any individualism as well as the risks which he incurs.
Leonardo Alarcón (30-Nov-1975)
