Born in 1968, Mexico.Lives and works in Mexico.Rodolfo de Florencia produces works defined by the intense projection of what Gillo Dorfles would call the iconic substance. An intensely iconographic work, much more than a figurative one. In any event, it is a kind of figuration that criticizes itself. It is a subversion of the figurative tradition based on a criticism of the representation. This process unavoidably goes through a sort of research of the semantic possibilities of the pictorial icon and of the way in which the pictorial icon has historically been handled within diverse artistic tendencies. It is not strange then that one of the habitual resources in the works of Rodolfo de Florencia be the isolation of the icon, seeking its greatest efficiency in semantic terms. There is a simulated dis-contextualization that is reverted into a re-contextualization, a search for a connection with the cultural field and with the communicative circumstance from which this icon has been extracted. We are faced with a fundamentally ironic work that tends to be subversive against a scale of social values, and even against a stable definition of the artistic. One of the resources of this irony is the allusion to the author, or the placement of the author as a part of the figurative system of the work. The work of Rodolfo de Florencia seems to underline every time we are confronted with an artificial object or a simulation. And he achieves this through the erosion of the limits between the highest purely spiritual level and the highest purely ornamental, functional and pragmatic levels of the artistic work. They are works conceived as ornamental objects that are simultaneously thinking the ornamental, questioning the ornamental, representing it as a value and a quality of the institutional system, that it is art itself. As a component of the system of values from which art is defined. Both the artificial and the ornamental -as well as the way in which they converge, coincide, are supplemented and are mutually reinforced - they are two essential components of that iconic substance we alluded at the beginning of the text. And they are inevitably the center of a discourse that seems to articulate the work carried out by Rodolfo de Florencia in the past years. … Read More