Neon and Video

Rodrigo García’s unhinged theatre is an appropriate response to a media and social landscape in which the confessional is consumed as if it were the most poisonous of aperitifs: “confessing joys”, warns this obsessive writer, is as stupid as baring one’s sorrows. We want everything at the same time, hypnotised by our stupidity, we compulsively zap and get trapped in the automatic doors of a police world. Rodrigo García amplifies violence and turns fear into the ultimate blazon of emotional life. Even if we pretend to jump over our shadow, we remain phobically subject to what distresses us.

It’s a bad thing and the problem flickers in a “wink” that reminds us of certain works by Bruce Nauman. Rodrigo García knows that “if you set your mind to it you might forget the words, but you can’t get rid of the images”.
This “oscillating” phrase (NO HAY NINGUN NINGUN PROBLEMA/HAY UN PROBLEMA) in neon was produced for the exhibition Cuidado y peligro de sí (Sala Amós Salvador, Logroño, 2020) and, in the midst of the covid-19 pandemic, it had an intense capacity not so much to alarm us as to question the promises of the “new normality”.
At the beginning of January 2021, Rodrigo García staged a theatrical-performative piece in the “luminous” and disturbing (familiar and strange in the Freudian sense) space it occupied.
The artist himself sent me, on 11 March 2021, an email in which he commented on this phrase with a double meaning: “In my parents’ house, the house of my childhood, the only place in the world that doesn’t belong to us, I lived eighteen years (at that age I left there in a hurry and without looking back) in the lie. My mother and I lived under the constant oppression of a madman, my father. His existence was based on denigrating us. At home, however, both of them were adamant that there was no problem. According to Dr. Freud, old problems accompany me to this day, each with its corresponding denial.”

Fernando Castro Rodriguez