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| Cristina Rodriguez Rodriguez is alert to the way in which central human experiences transcend geographical boundaries. Born in Colombia, she studied at the University of Los Andes in Bogota, holding her first show there in 1987. In I989 she left for London, where in 1991 she received an MA from the Slade School of Fine Arts. She has also spent time painting in Zimbabwe and New York. Although she now lives in London, she speaks passionately of Colombia - of the poverty and the violence, but also of the intense cultural richness of the country that produced Gabriel Garcia Marquez and gave birth to 'magic realism'. Some of the recent work revives those places with a lingering significance in her life - a playful retelling of remembered scenes in Venice or Paris, or of an autumnal walk amongst wild horses in Somerset. Other pictures push deeper into imaginary country, as with the female figure who rises from the cast off skin of a snake. Elsewhere she rises up a long vertical canvas in a similarly transformative quest, climbing out of a secret Eden via a winding umbilical path and up beyond the solitary white cloud towards an eagle perched on a mountain peak. If there is reference here to the stories of Isabelle Allende, there is also something of the lucid colour and visionary imaginings of Ken Kiff, although they remain distinctly her own, fashioned as they are from her heritage and her insistent message of feminine healing. Rodriguez's South American heritage remains a powerful influence on her work. It is there in her confident use of bright oil colours - violet brushed over ultramarine, or ardent Indian yellow cooled down here and there with passages of grey or black. It is also evident in her skill at condensing complex reality into her own symbolic language, and perhaps even in her robust adherence to figurative, narrative painting, regardless of whether it's in or out of fashion. Please click image for details |