…this series of portraits that at first glance appear to us as extraterrestrial beings, once we understand the images they become more familiar than they appear, “humans too human” perhaps more human than they appear.
And for Adorno's negative dialectic, the problem was given as a human being in a world hostile to humans, the characters of Etem seem so natural to us to the extent that their presence is outside the pose of the portraits of the kings of the past, rather resemble the workers, peasants, common people in general, portrayed by Gustave Courbet or the realists of the mid-19th century, these new realists are captured by the camera in the usual development of their daily lives, in the hostile world of the desert or the swamp or the storm…”
Hernán Pacurucú. curator
Fragment of the text: A glacial aesthetic.
Approach to the contemporary photography of Rodrigo Etem
TV II, From the series Ser Cosa
TV II, 2010
From the series Ser Cosa
Archival pigment print on fine art paper
Dimensions: 30 H x 40 W in.
Edition of 7
Unframed
Rodrigo Etem has been investigating and working surreptitiously on concepts that aim to disseminate questions about our daily experience. Thinking today from a certain geography, in terms of territoriality, is being diluted with new technologies, the ways of communicating, and the imposed distances. Etem's pieces, far from being distant in today's challenge, get fully into the field of everyday life and desires. Crossing an entire continent from the screen, creating films without cameras, collecting all the errors of a virtual representation of the world, and making digital images occupy physical space, are some of the clues that can be found in his latest works.
