Residuo boca, 2012
Instalación y performance
Image: Archive of LABoral. Sergio Redruello
Carlos Rodríguez-Méndez’s work in Presencia Activa connects spaces at MARCO and at LABoral and in the public sphere through a number of actions orchestrated in varying places and areas of influence. The actions examine the semantics of sculpture through the optics of connection and belonging, receptacle (as intervened space), residue, variability and estrangement.
The actions and their traces form a continuum throughout the duration of the exhibition within the space of the city, of the museum and of a number of both inanimate and human receptacles. Rodríguez-Méndez uses primary materials, forms and languages to build sculptures, installations and interventions. In his actions and in the processes of construction and installation of a piece, Rodríguez-Méndez behaves just like his sculptures, appropriating a place —its history, meaning, raison d’être, its relationship with the human being and with the environment— in such a way that the artist’s body in the public space takes on a sculptural appearance and reflection.
His interest in sculpture, in action and in the word, in the analysis of those idioms and ways of interfering with their semantics, has driven him to create works that expand beyond the site of installation. He uses and construes cylinders, pipes, peat and oil, sound and the body as ungraspable forms and materials, as elementary geometries that question and alter the process of construction, that address the coercion of space and decisions pertaining to the visibility and end of a work, to temporality and to error.
