Gamaliel Rodriguez: Uncertainty Gates

Unremarkable modernist buildings and thickset observation towers surrounded by thick vegetation conjured up with delicate, urgent strokes and smudges. Uncertainty Gates, a recent series of drawings by the Puerto Rican artist Gamaliel Rodriguez (born 1977), can be described this way, a straightforward characterization that is at once accurate and wholly inadequate. It's true that Rodriguez's subjects, both in this group of works and in others, are the anonymous, expedient constructions associated with the military, with industry, with airports, and with shopping malls, but stating this obvious fact fails to suggest the mysterious, unsettling potency of his images.

Spend some time with these deceptively casual drawings and you soon realize that nothing is quite what it seems to be at first acquaintance. Rather than yielding more revelatory detail with close attention, Rodriguez's elegantly rendered geometric forms—which we read, correctly, as buildings—become more uncanny, even slightly sinister, the longer we study them. The relationship of the pared down forms to the ground becomes increasingly perplexing. In many views of economically rendered buildings, we are not only denied entrance, but also denied even a glimpse of the interior. Rodriguez's elongated, pared-down terminals and warehouses transubstantiate into pure geometric forms, divorced from function, but at the same time, faintly menacing—like the monolith in the film 2001—and then start to announce themselves as reclining figures. We begin to identify the towers, with their windowed upper regions, as airport fixtures, but they, too, morph into anthropomorphic presences. Everything seems to be about to be overtaken by tropical vegetation. The constant in all this shape-shifting is Rodriguez's touch: insistent, but refined clusters of ballpoint pen lines; suave, repetitive graphite marks; transparent pools of ink and thinned out paint, all resulting in ravishing orchestrations of richly varied tonalities, from velvety darks to insubstantial hazes. Exquisite control and mastery coexist with echoes of the kind of obsessive drawings that bored teenage boys insert in the margins of their school notebooks.

Like all of Rodriguez's work, however initially seductive, his recent drawings are politically charged. Begun in 2017, some of the works in the series predate the hurricane that devastated Puerto Rico in September of that year. The palpable sense of neglect, of encroaching vegetation, of absence, that these drawings emanate reflects Rodriguez's description of the series as being "about our current bankrupt situation in the island" but also, more generally, about "failures in the economy and corruption." The character of the drawings that predate the destruction wreaked by hurricane Maria, he says, shows us the reality of a U.S. territory that has been abandoned. The images of towers, based on real airport towers, in various locations on the island, record damage from the hurricane but, Rodriguez says, "they were also damaged before, when we hit the bottom in our economic hurricane."

The drawings are at once completely convincing and far from literal. Our attention shifts from the assertiveness of the suggested images to Rodriguez's virtuoso mark-making, then back to his elusive imagery. But as we enjoy the fragility and sensitivity of his drawings, we are also conscious of a pervasive sense of melancholy. Rodriguez is well aware of this. "I try to re-interpret the beauty and chaos of our current state," he says. "Like an old illustration of a distant future."

Figure 1808.

(2017), ballpoint pen, colored pencil, and acrylic on paper, 22 x 30 inches.

Courtesy Nathalie Karg Gallery, New York. © Gamaliel Rodriguez.

Figure 1809.

(2017), ballpoint pen, colored pencil, and acrylic on paper, 22 x 30 inches.

Courtesy Nathalie Karg Gallery, New York. © Gamaliel Rodriguez.

Figure 1813.

(2017), graphite on paper, 74 1/2 x 48 inches.

Courtesy Nathalie Karg Gallery, New York. © Gamaliel Rodriguez.

Figure 1814.

(2017), ballpoint pen, acrylic, and colored pencil on paper, 76 x 150 inches.

Courtesy Nathalie Karg Gallery, New York. © Gamaliel Rodriguez.

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