My project draws on individual personality and how it comes into conflict with the group or collective, drawing on the traits that differentiate us within a society that tends to make everyone equal and classify us within organisational structures.

I address the paradox between personal identity and the uniformity of the group.

In my search for images, I have sought an analytical position concerning the individual, scouring photo archives from a variety of sources: newspapers, search engines for images on the internet, aerial tracking programs, etc. The notion of painting as flat surface provides help in interpreting the idea of equality, and the frequent use of grey and blue colours brings me nearer the collective imagination. The rectangular border of some collective portraits serves to interpret the idea of organisation, as do the lines painted in car parks and the beach towels laid out in grids on the sand. Some differentiating features do appear among the framed characters, but they are minimal because they dissolve in the context of the work and build into a unity.

My objective in painting is to unify the elements by creating a musical score of repetitions, a randomness of personalities within the ordered system and tiny particularities that are impossible to sustain on returning to the whole work of which they form a part. I group the elements based on rules that are derived from photography or that I re-establish and recreate in social groupings.

I take pleasure in fixing my gaze on the groups forming within society and how such groups, which bring people together by professions, restrict the individual and force him to stand out from his group.

Daniel Rodriguez’s paintings of groups and grids of people and places are all about human systems of organisation: parking spaces, employee charts, school graduations and reunions. Each painting takes a distanced view on its subject, both in compositional and in formal terms. ‘Edificio’, a painting of a modernist apartment block complete with hanging laundry, bikes and pot plants, is shown in its entirety, as though at long range, and rendered in a characteristically washed-out and flattened brushstroke in chalky pinks and blues. That distancing (in one work, ’Marcha’, a large crowd is seen directly from above, as though through the eyes of a pigeon contemplating its next target) shouldn’t be mistaken for coldness, though, as it might be in the works of other painters working in a similarly tentative, faux-naive style. Rodriguez’s works are full of a kind of warm amusement, a sort of fascinated attention to the habits of human beings that is both empathetic and oddly alien.
In ‘Reunion’, a grid of headshots (evidently drawn, however loosely, from a photographic source) sits on a light grey ground, like a corporate advent calendar (Christmas Eve: Helen from HR; Boxing Day: Roger from Retailing). It’s one of many winks and nods in Rodriguez’s work towards the kind of hardcore asceticism of modernist painters like Agnes Martin or Sol LeWitt. You might say that the grid, paragon of hands-off seventies conceptual art, is the butt of the joke here, and Rodriguez’s aerial shots of car parks (complete with cack-handed alignments and nudging bumpers) work as sly parodies of that sort of high-minded practice. You could even see those blanched and stiffened faces as headshots of the upper eschalons of the contemporary art world, each one an uncomfortable bureaucrat with a bad tie.
However, Rodriguez’s works are more than mere in-jokes: each painting is a small celebration of the various real (as opposed to virtual) communities that form an ordinary life. Look at the painting ‘Amigos de la Tierra’. A gathering of studiously casual people (employees, it’s assumed, of the eponymous environmental charity; a blaring green background makes the point pretty clear) are seen from above. The source must be a photo taken from a balcony or second-floor window, perhaps to be displayed in the office’s reception area. The employees squint and rock on their heels while waiting for the signal to disperse and get back to work. Like a bisected anthill, the painting records an exposure of the realities of any corporate organisation: that it’s (horrifyingly) made up of people like you. And the title of ‘Empleados del Mes’ – ‘Employee of the Month’ – initially surprises: each face is rendered with gleeful satirical detail, so that the parade of boss-eyed and bad-haired heads looks more like a police line-up or sex offenders register. Yet as with all Rodriguez’s works, it’s ourselves we see reflected back, however painfully. As Demetri Martin says, “’Employee of the month’ is a good example of how someone can be a winner and a loser at the same time”.
About The Author
Ben Street is an Art History teacher, gallery educator and freelance curator based in London. He is a lecturer at the National Gallery and has been a gallery educator at the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Hayward Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Courtauld Gallery, London. He writes on contemporary art for Art21, Artnet and Art Review and has written catalogue essays for galleries in Antwerp, Dublin and London. He leads regular art-historical excursions to northern Italy for Art History Abroad. Ben is currently involved with a new art space in north-west London, Intervention Gallery, for which he co-curated the group exhibition 'Fine Things to be Seen'. Ben's collected writings can be found on his blog, here: https://benstreet.co.uk/