La Nacion newspaper, San Jose, Costa Rica
Sunday, April 15th 2007
Paintings
Night Humiditie
Gallery 99. RODOLFO STANLEY EXHIBITS 36 ACRYLIC PAINTINGS THAT AGITATE BETWEEN HIS BAILONGOS AND THE NIGHT.
Dario Chinchilla
dariochinchilla@nacion.com
There are realities that, in the darkness of the night, only the corner of the eye dares to register. However, Rodolfo Stanley’s paint brush is willing to paint them naked. His paintings take a walk on the wild side – as the American singer Lou Reed suggests -, be it in the sweat-pouring frenzy of the popular dancing rooms or those “dubious night clubs” that are well covered by tabloids.
At present, the Costa Rican painter exhibits a group of paintings that are a follow up of the Bailongos (dancing nightclubs) topic. In these paintings, the colors dance Costa Rican swing with the shapes, but this time emphasizing the portrait of crowds dancing in working class dancing rooms.
Furthermore, he introduces us to a new group of paintings titled The Night in which are portraited scenes in bars, male stripper shows, gay nightclubs and other places branded by the comfortable disapproval on the part of the “decent people”.
This exhibition takes place at Gallery 99, situated in a corner of the Rohrmoser Boulevard, across from the northeast corner of the Apostolic Nunciature (Sin and Holiness a crossroad away from each other).
Portrait artist, critic, and fable creator, Rodolfo Stanley examines in both groups of works the sociology of pleasure. He shows us the basic call of the flesh that finds comfort in another one’s flesh, as well as an excuse when the sun departs.
Sweat Tico style. Stanley explains that previously he dedicated himself more to portraying middle class people in his Bailongos, whereas his most recent works have centered more on the protrayal of crowds in popular ballrooms like the Karimar discoteque in Guadalupe.
Night sins. Stanley works in other investigation scenarios that tresspass the limit of “decent customs”. The bars, the prostitution, and the clandestinity in gay nightlife are some of the topics that his most recent works have dealt with.
“I take on from a given concept; for example “THE NIGHT”. Within this concept I find a range of topics”. In THE NIGHT, the artist serves as a documentalist of hidden realities, as in the case of bars; in others, as a critic of serious social problems, such as child prostitution.
Among the most striking pieces, stand out those that depict women ignited by alcohol ingestion and whose lustful atention is placed on a male stripper. The artist reflects, “here I have to be very careful with achieving a balance between description, dramatism, and esthetics. I’m dealing with strong topics, but the paintings’ success lies in their esthetic attraction.
Furthermore, Stanley explains that, throughout his career as an artist, he has incessantly played with irony, denunciation, irrevence, eroticism, and sensuality.
“The night is a frontier when sex is dangerous and mysterious; it is when love is on sale”, he reflects.
Stanley defines his painting as one “with barroque backgrounds, emphasizing esthetic elements, with a slightly expressionist style and with a very Latin American feeling”. He defends that in his country he’s “the only painter that depicts crowds”.
On the other hand, he acknowledges that, being his topics so marginal, this type of painting is difficult to commercilize. “Our society is very much directed towards pleasure. However, we tend to restrict the artistic evidencing of this society”.
Nevertheless, he is emphatic in adding, “I do not try to be complacent with a market that tends to favor painting for hotel decoration”.
Translated by
Maria Teresa Perez Rego
Fine Arts Critique
Aurelio Horta
La Nacion Newspaper Art Critic
Rodolfo Stanley
Movements of Life
The capability for sensibility, that which we call aesthetic culture, grows as our experience becomes more globalized. From the first walk on the moon up to audiovisual interpersonal communication, without undermining their differences in space and time, the qualification of the senses has increasingly compromised the artistic order.
The pleasure in global concomitance implies, of course, a dis(location) of this order that, among other reasons, resolves many of the limitations that cultisms could not explain through the reception of art. Rodolfo Stanley knows this, that is why he saves above all the movement, which is life itself, since in the midst of any disorder, this is a primary philosophical condition. In art historiography, movement is always a great challenge; hence, since prehistoric buffalo, the attitude and the treatment of space have held the key to expression; two aspects that seem to flow without any complication from the artist’s hand.
The sensitivity of the dance is equally perceived in El Tobogán (The Slide) as in the ballrooms of any Club Center. The scenes recreate different types of dance floors and allow us to refer to the representation’s sociological aspect, thus trespassing any localism. Taste recreates desire’s appetite, and, later on, the possibility of possessing.
In dance´s first manifestations in relation to agricultural chores, movement required quality, in its profoundness and frankness lay the obtaining of the fruit.
Popular dance never resigned to this maxim; Stanley expresses this concept with baroque fury, impressionist strategy and a categorical sense of romance, that Latin American infinite. And it is that taste’s autonomy also articulates a community that the experience of dance in this painting installs in a forest of refractory symbols of cultural dimension; that which is merely artistic exteriorizes the force of the drawing, maybe the greatest proof that the themes are but one more attribute of the work of art, and thus really defines it in its resolution with other cognitive values: color, perspective, representation, and some others. Stanley takes advantage of movement. If in the first one, movement gets ready, here the ambience is completed. In some paintings, the color could have been more processed; but beyond this, his ex profeso silhouhetting of the volumes rescues what is essential to spatial rhythm, and the gain of a detail in the objects’ intelligent impresicions, and in the chosen pretensions of bodies and expressions.
To point out some of the works would be like remembering only some of the dance pieces, and this is the opposite of what we´d want. Baile Caliente (Hot Dance), La Olla del Viernes (Friday’s Cooking Pot), or Leda y Rodolfo (Leda and Rodolfo) are moments, as stated in a bolero, not to be forgotten; but Giros de la Noche (Night Twists) or Muevelo (Move it) can properly come to any salon since the pleasure of painting and of any artform is in its creative veracity. If at any given moment this conciliates or responds to socials worries or disillusions, it is to save life. The public knows this very well and is grateful.
Quixote’s Mancha (Stain)
By Amalia Chaverri
This last year 2005 was characterized by a great number of events that the Ministry of Culture and other national institutions carried out to commemorate the 400th birthday of the publishing of the first part of the Ingenious Nobleman don Quixote de <?xml:namespace prefix st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />la Mancha.
It was a year where renowned artists and people interested in the Fine Arts recreated the image of the Knight of the Sad Countenance; the quality of the results obtained and the number of projects exhibited proved that don Quixote is still alive in the social imaginary of the Costa Rican people.
There were also special cases like the one that concerns us today. We are aware that the outstanding Costa Rican artist Rodolfo Stanley executed all throughout the year 2005 a silent and constant work of great quality about our unforgeatable character. Through paintings on canvas and monotypes, both techniques that he skillfully masters, Stanley redeveloped and recreated the situations and predicaments of the knight with great imagination, and within his distint style and mastery of color.
Thus the importance of this calendar sponsored by the company Masterlitho and that comprises six of Rodolfo Stanley’s pieces: The simbolism of the Quixote will continue to be present, month after month throughout 2006, accompanying us in our daily lives in its counting of the passing of days. Likewise, it will be a calendar worthy of the designation of the city of San Jose as “Capital of Iberoamerican culture” throughout 2006.
The untiring don Quixote will continue to ride among us.
Dancing goes to Seville
La Nacion newspaper
Art Critic
Doriam Diaz
18/12/04
An art show by Rodolfo Stanley.
The sensuality, erotisism, and atmosphere of the Costa Rican dance halls will arrive to Seville (Spain) with the monotypes of the Costa Rican artist Rodolfo Stanley.
As of next Tuesday, the foundation Martin Robles of Seville will inaugurate an exhibit with 30 pieces in which Stanley represents different nightlife scenes of ballroom dancing.
All this, through the use of fast brush strokes, chromatic games, stains, textures, and bodies that dance to the rythm, insinuation of the friction between skin and skin, and situations typical of ballroom dancing.
Today in Seville, Abel Pacheco, President of Costa Rica, will present the book Poems, stories, and drawings, and has arranged to attend the opening of the art show.
The Foundation Martin Robles invited Stanley to exhibit in Sevilla after a Foundation official visited Costa Rica and bought some of the artist’s graphic art pieces.
The Foundation Martin Robles bought 25 of the 30 art pieces exhibited.
Cultural Supplement – Tiempos del Mundo – Costa Rica
03/18/2004
“Seduction in Color”
by Andrea Solano
The Costa Rican Artist Rodolfo Stanley pays a graphic homage to eroticism with an exhibit of 30 monotypes in which lines, colors, and textures dance the dance of sensuality. The pieces are exhibited in the National Gallery of the Children’s Museum (Galería Nacional del Museo de los Niños, in San Jose, Costa Rica.)
Depiction of human bodies or their details; atmospheres and sensations; chromatic divertimentos and unique prints on paper. In his most recent exhibit, the Costa Rican Artist Rodolfo Stanley takes advantages of expressionism to recapture the human body as an instrument for communication.
Seductive vehicle
The exhibit’s purpose is to seduce the spectator by using the human body as bait, and technical artistry as a tool. In each piece, the artist plays with nudity, masculine or feminine, line, color, and movement in order to “recover the interest in the human figure as an unrepeatable form. I retake the values implicit in classical art, but with an imminently personal vision that reveals content charged with sensuality and eroticism, as in my previous works”, states Stanley.
However, the nudity is not explicit, but rather insinuated, thus its attractiveness: “Eroticism is a game and its world is made up of rituals, not sacred but pagan, of voluptuous carnality.”
Unique Print
In his effort to incursion in other expressive art forms, Stanley began to work on monotypes about three years ago: “To me this is like a serious divertimento, the symphonies I compose on canvas.” The procedure involves painting and printmaking. It consists of designing and painting on an acrylic or metal plate, the image resulting is later transferred to paper, either manually or by using an etching press.
Stanley’s fascinating “NIGHT”
La Nacion newspaper
Art review
Juan Bernal Ponce
11/23/99
It was quite late at night when Rodolfo Stanley entered the room. The air was full of jukebox and smoke, bodies moved at the rhythm of seduction and sex. The painter surreptitiously took out his notebook and with fast strokes sketched some contours and silhouettes; the rest he kept in his spongeous memory. This way he could later paint in his studio this “Night Series”, which, more than a report on the underworld, is a descent into hell in a romantic way.
This exhibit is an intense visit to the oposing world of oblique passions and love in instalments, a testimony of alcoholic anguish followed by mating and hangover, but all the iniquity artistically emerges from the canvas with fine colors and a tender texture, greasy and thick, that lets us catch a gimple of the eloquent drawing under light layers and layers of pigment.
The artist exerts a shrewd observation of the features ilumninated by flashy spots and violent contrast of shadows, he is fascinated by the finely described detail: a certain moldgreen colored bottle with its livid shine, cigarettes buds by the dozens under the bed, the infamous dog that sniffs out the residue of the bacchanal.
The venerated presence of the old jukebox, as intricate as a musical corvette made of contradictory materials, dominates the space while a streapteaser undresses her abundant flesh in the foreground, determining a canonic vertical that erects itself as dictator of a composition close to the golden section.
Another room is the scenery for strange contests, a competition of wornout derrieres before a jocund masculine public that can be seen in violent contrast against the light, in a very amighetian-style pale brightness, a blinding white explosion that cuts out contorted silhouettes.
In all this there is an inmense cumulus of observation and an elaborated process in which crude suggestions are sorted out, some chosen and others rejected, to then undertake the task of conceiving relevant and prolific combinations, followed by the rite of sketching the weft of the canvas, of oposing masses and of configurating the choreographies with attitudes and gestures: a certain masculine hip way too bent, the gesture of a hand, the glassy eyes from staying up late.
It is not of little merit not to repeat oneself, the fact of delivering a complete sampler of innovative scenes and compositions, cinematographic frames carefully cut out. Having a great experience in designing helps to master an abundant and thick reality that can escape from your hands, spilling over and losing its capability of impact, thus turning into a binge distant from art, into futil groping
On the contrary, the artist Stanley not only shows us his know-how to do, but also his know-how to observe, this way he accomplishes a work endowed with high emotional and esthetic values. His collection a homage to the night not only marks a change in his career, but also reaffirms his relevant position within the current fine arts panorama.
Newspaper “La Nación”, Sunday, February 18, 1996.
By Carlos Cortés
Note: Rodolfo Stanley’s series “The Parks”, will begin starting March 1, a transatlantic journey that
Newspaper “La Nación”, Wednesday, February 8, 1995.
Cultural Section
Provocative Parks (author unstated)
Rodolfo Stanley’s Parks make us want to leave our everyday clothing on the side, climb into the painting’s frame and penetrate its dream world: to risk being assimilated in its bluish colors and wake up turned into one of its tumultuous women leaning against a bench, being observed by a blind musician or in an upside down position because of a magician’s fancy; riding a horse over a tree or in a fantastic carrousel.
These days the Costa Rican artist is exhibiting 15 large format pieces in The Americas Collection, Private & Corporate Fine Arts Dealers, a prestigious Miami gallery.
Newspaper “La Nación”, Sunday, February 18, 1996.
Itinerant Parks
By Carlos Cortés
Note: Rodolfo Stanley’s series “The Parks”, will begin starting March 1, a transatlantic journey that will first anchor in the Mailletz Gallery in Paris, to then move on to the Museum of Caceres in Spain, and will probably conclude its voyage in Belgium a couple of months later. The painter will exhibit a total of 20 paintings with its dreamlike scenes of urban parks with which he intends to warm up the cold European winter and springtime.
(Caption: Skating in the Park, by Rodolfo Stanley (acrylic, 1996).)