René Francisco Rodríguez

Part of a generation of artists that emerged at the end of the 1980s, René Francisco Rodríguez (Holguín, Cuba, 1960) received the 2010 National Fine Arts Award at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. Since 1994, this recognition is presented every year by the Cuban Ministry of Culture and is given only once to any particular living visual arts creator who resides on the Island, in recognition of his/her entire artistic career. This is the first time that an artist born after 1959 receives the award. Rodríguez graduated from the Escuela Nacional de Artes (ENA) in 1982 and from the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) in 1987, where he has served as a very unorthodox teacher. He has been an obligatory referent since the 1990s within the Cuban art world, initially as a result of his collaborative efforts with Eduardo Ponjuán, and later on as he developed his career as a solo artist. Rodríguez's artistic discourse has maintained a constant ascendance as he combines experimentation, with renovation, research, a critical sense and interest in social themes; affinities that also find a place in his role as a transgressive teacher which cannot be separated from the totality of his artistic creation. René Francisco Rodríguez has been "a facilitator or a medium" a description given by the artist himself to more than one generation of emerging artists, some of whom became prominent figures in todays Cuban visual arts movement. His work as an educator going on for twenty years was internationally recognized for the first time at the 7th Havana Biennial, as the third edition of his collective project Galería DUPP Spanish acronym for Based on Pedagogic Pragmatics was awarded the UNESCO Prize for the Arts. Likewise, the San Francisco Art Institute in California, in the U.S., recognized him in 2001 with the Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts, for his work as an artist and as a teacher. His creative energy is substantiated by the twenty-four solo shows under his belt. Among the more relevant ones from the last ten years are: his presentation at the 52nd Venice Biennale (Italy, 2007), Entwined Stories at PanAmerican Art Projects (U.S., 2008), and the exhibitions Interpreter (2009) and Paintings from Yesterday and Tomorrow (2010), presented in Havana. Also noteworthy of mention are his socially conscious works, like Patio de Nin (Nin's Patio), created at Havana's El Romerillo neighborhood (2004-2005), his collective project Plaza Almada (2009), along with the various residencies, workshops he has completed around the globe. The multiform, dynamic, socially conscious, critical and irreverent work created by René Francisco Rodríguez, not solely addresses existential issues in his country, but also the problematic aspects of its history. The processual and performative nature of this work has become more prevalent, in the same manner his artistic practice reaffirms his "belief that art can encounter life, blend with it, and transform it."