ABOUT THE WORK

These three works by Manuel Rodriguez Sr. depend for their impact on direct experience. Their meanings are released not by photographic reproduction or verbal explanation but by the face to face encounter with the actual surface, actual size, actual colors, and actual textures. Created in 1978, the works continue to speak powerfully to the viewer, even if the passage of time may alter some of our perceptions. With the artist having explored serigraphy, lithography, woodcut, etching, aquatint, mezzotint and dry point prints. The three works show how varied and prolific the gallery workshop of Manuel Rodriguez was. Although trained in the academic tradition of copying from nature, he prefers to deal with highly abstract forms and experiments in textural values. More than any other Filipino artist, he has done the most to make the print a popular medium and give it a chic image among patrons. A resident of New York City, he put up the Pioneer Print Center at 1170 Broadway. Expectedly, with his awareness of the pulse of the art zeitgeist, Rodriguez Sr. works continue to evolve with new ideas and corresponding shifts in his sensibility. What with the use of pleasantly strong dissonant colors and creatively conceived surfaces. The emerging imageries are the result of the passage from potency to act: an allegory of the creative process.