Cultural Supplement
Tiempos del Mundo Costa Rica
Thursday, March 18, 2004
Andrea Solano
Seduction in Color
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
23/11/99
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.
Rodolfo Stanley, Movements of Life
Aurelio Horta
Fine Arts Critique, Newspaper La Nacion
Wednesday, July 14, 2004
The capability of being sensitive, that which we call esthetic culture, broadens as our experience becomes more globalized. From walking in space to cibernetic communication, the qualification of the senses compromises more and more the artistic order.
The pleasure in global concomitance implies, of course, a (dis)location of this order that, among other reasons, overcomes many of the limitations that sophisticated explanations were not able to explain in relation to art. Stanley knows this, it 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 the prehistoric buffalo, attitude and treatment of space have kept the key to expression; two aspects that seem to flow from the artist’s hands without any major complication.
The dance’s sensibility is felt in "El Tobogan" (The Slide) the same way it is felt in any ballroom of any Center Club, so one could speak of that sociological aspect of the representation, in which the different scenes recreate different types of ballrooms, thus going beyond any type of localism. Taste recreates desire’s appetite, and, later on, the possibility to possess. In the earliest manifestations of dance in relationship to agriculture, movement required a certain quality because the fruit obtained derived from its profoundness and frankness.
Popular dance never renounced to this premise; Stanley talks at length about this concept with baroque fury, impressionistic strategy, and a categorically romantic feeling; that infinite of the Latin American. And it is that the taste’s autonomy also articulates with a community that the experience of dance within this painting installs in a forest of refractory symbols of a cultural dimension. That which is merely artistic reveals the force of the drawing, maybe this is greatest proof that the subject matter is just another attribute of the work of art, which really defines itself in relation to other cognitive values such as color, perspective, representation, among others.
Stanley takes advantage of the value of movement from a sculptural perspective. If in movement there’s displacement, in the later atmosphere and environment are consumed. Beyond color, an on-purpose silhouetting of the volumes recovers the essential of spatial rhythm with a gain of details in the smart impreciseness of the objects, and in the optional pretensions of the bodies and the expressions.
To point out only some of the pieces would be like remembering only a few of the dance steps, and this would be totally contrary to art’s real intention. Baile Caliente (Hot Dancing), La Olla del Viernes (Friday’s Cooking Pot), or Leda y Rodolfo (Leda and Rodolfo), are moments to remember, as in the words of a "bolero" (romantic melody); but Giros de la Noche (Twists of the Night), or Muevelo (Move it) can properly come to any ballroom, since the pleasure of painting is found here in its creative fidelity. If in any given moment this conciliates or responds to social concerns or disappointments, fairly enough it is to save life. The public knows about this very well and is thankful.
Translation: Maria Teresa Perez Rego, March 2006
Itinerant Parks
La Nación newspaper
Carlos Cortés
Rodolfo Stanley paints what he sees and, what is even more difficult, makes us see or imagine what he sees.
His work explodes, vibrates, swarms in search for movement within its fragile stillness. It is a subtle zigzag between the design’s illusion and the omnipresence of color. His forms, simultaneously aerial and rarefied, volatile and intertwined, filter in a gauze drenched with color that springs out towards our eyes.
As in a movie that reacts to the acid of an overflowing passion, the colors come to action and vibrate in a perfectionist urge that his painting has had since the beginning.
Stanley hates white, it terrorizes him; this is why he always paints, composes, mixes, and accumulates on backgrounds that have been previously prepared.
His painting is the mix of the ritual of life and art. The cycle, the rite, the myth that saves us from death. His painting is not so much a space as it is a vibration in the canvass’s immobile – mobile air, which is never white. Still, calm agitation that, within the painting, is necessarily dimension and perspective. What do we retain from all this?
We retain that total irradiation of color. This Parks series attains a rare balance between saturation and transparency. We can simultaneously see the matter suspended within the unstableness and hesitation of volumes wherein we register the form, the archetype, the shadow of the world, the drawing of the cosmos. Time doesn’t pass by in Stanley’s paintings.
We retain the color and, in its almost tactile water, a series of impressions: a carrousel – life, a carnival, the party, an orgy, a masquerade, a witches gathering, games, couples that are (un)done by (re)making love – "Do we make love, or does love make us?" asks Cortazar.
Elusive certitude
Stanley sees materiality fleeing, an elusive certitude through the passing of time. Maybe this is why he has "summoned" the Parks – as one who proclaims the abolition of time – as a structural element of his most recent art work: these parks where night is almost perpetual, in which nothing occurs and, by constantly invoking the repetition of human acts, everything occurs.
Life begins and ends in the park: urban field, artificial nature where children start to play and elderly people lose their memories. Bridge, transit, tunnel to the waste ground between one city and another; limit that instead of separating, unites. A place for beginnings, sacrifices, games, secrets, discovery. The real park is always within ourselves.
Parks, which are since always passages between one world and another, places for transgression, for the light-dark ambiguity that trespasses us, spaces that are intimate as well as public, spaces that are empty and filled: open and closed, all at the same time.
His painting has the quality of lightness, the characters and objects in the painting levitate in their own spatial ink, in their own ungrasped artistic crossbreeding, with no possibility of dismantlement, as fragments to its magnet. It is this enchainment of flows and appearances that creates "the ceremony", the staging of its creation.
A work profoundly nocturnal, erotic, in which young girls are old, women are dolls or dolls are women, saints are bitches and bitches…saints.
A creation that is religious and sacrilegious at the same time, dreamlike and realistic, innocent and perverse, sensuous and grotesque, where things are bathed by a suspended luminosity that sharpens them as well as it blurs them.
He paints what he sees and makes us see what he paints: a world of silhouettes and appearances, of dismembered masks, of midnight make-up that hide an exquisite corpse, an armor too human.
"What’s behind the gesture, what’s beyond the color?", asks Stanley. However, without a direct response the artist portraits that dead sigh that remains stuck to the instant glass of our gaze.
In the oscillating human gaze, the artist has discovered the eternity that flees, the infinite multiplication of spaces that hide the denial of space. To paint the color is to also paint the void. "To be is the reason to stop being," says the imaginary and real Portuguese poet Ricardo Reis.
Quixote’s Mancha (Stain)
Amalia Chaverri
November 2005
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 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.
