Memory Loop by Rodolfo Agrella

The Plan and The Plane

Septiembre – Noviembre 2016

Curatorial Text

Collecting Knowledge*

The visual poetry of Rodolfo Agrella.

“To make a collection is to find, acquire, organize and store items, whether in a room, a house, a library, a museum or a warehouse. It is also, inevitably, a way of thinking about the world – the connections and principles that produce a collection contain assumptions, juxtapositions, findings, experimental possibilities and associations. Collection-making, you could say, is a method of producing knowledge.” 

When you navigate through the archives of Rodolfo’s work, you find yourself in a very ambiguous and unfamiliar territory. The diversity of media, scales and approaches; creates a vast repertoire of images and messages, not only a joy to the critical eye, but also a work in constant progress.

Is this Art? Is this Design?

From the days of the “Yellow Laboratory”, Agrella’s early Studio in Caracas, we recognize an obsession for the Plan and the Plane, that comes to the surface in unrecognizable mutations.

Lines, patterns and repetitions are part of a methodology used to create abstract compositions based in a familiar vocubulary. You know you are looking at something you may have seen before, Is it and indigenuous pattern? Is it an architectural plan? Is it a graphic design? Is it a painting? Is it visual poetry?

This collection was created as an exploration of forms, a notation, a text.

Almost like a botanist, the work is presented as a sequence of variations of what seems to be, a basic module. The white surface contains a black form that is almost identical in volumen, but absolutely different in size and shape. This black forms seem enigmatic at first glance, although they come from the families of Arp, Calder, or more directly from the Nenias of Gerd Leufert.

Black on white, visual communication, form and space as fundamental concepts.

The form has arms, legs, edges, cut outs, smoothness, movement, feels like an architectural drawing sometimes, organic and structured in moments, free and open. An interplay between positive and negative, a sequence, a story.

In “Crudo” an earlier collection, Rodolfo’s work was an intervention of black geometric forms on top of natural wood utensils. At that time the black form created a disruption on the passive support. The forms were simple, the support more complex.

The work becomes almost scientific the moment you read a structure behind it, but then, inmediately, the artist, betrays the support and covers the space with color. Color that grows as a cloak on top of the pieces, respecting no limits or frames, then the exhibition becomes a performance and the result is an installation, is it really?

Where is this color coming from?

Tropicality has become a constant motivation on his practice.

Monochrome interventions in spaces, something he tested in previous projects, becomes a very subtle veil that covers the “in between” spaces. The work, is it a series of pieces? or is it one single piece under the colored veil?

This constant ambiguity and complexity in the work of Rodolfo Agrella, makes this body of work, an exercise of curiosity.

Henry Rueda

Summer 2016

*taken from the book: ways of curating by Hans Ulrich Obrist