RODRIGO ETEM
REPRESENTED ARTIST
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.
ARTWORKS
All the faults of the world Series
In recent years -through the use, production, and appropriation of content hosted on the net- The artist has been developing a body of work that aims to resignify narratives from the files.
The series "All the faults of the world", 2021/23 are digital prints printed on Hahnemuhle smooth canvas. The Images are taken by Google Street View (GSV) users that cover a 360º viewing angle and are captured to show everything that is around the subject taking the photograph. These images, uploaded to the application (GSV) are geolocated at the precise point where they were taken so that other users can access them. Due to involuntary human errors in the capture, a small percentage of these images present anomalies because some fragment does not have a record, and a void is produced in the image and an opaque figure without representation. The entry of these anomalies into the system interferes with any attempt to full representation of the world. Motivated by this, the artist in the game "travels the world" from the app, looking to build my collection of failures from around the world.
Ser Cosa Series
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…”
