Abel Rodriguez: Aguante

Charlie James Gallery is proud to present Abel Rodriguez: Aguante, an exhibition of paintings and works on paper from the artist’s Fotos y recuerdos series, which reexamines photographs and ephemera from the artist’s childhood in the 1990s and early 2000s. By reproducing photo snapshots in soft pastel and pencil, Rodriguez introduces a subtle blur into the image that speaks both to the nature of photography in a pre-digital era and to a distinct feeling of nostalgia that infuses the scenes. The exhibition’s title refers to the endurance – the grit and guts – required to build a life that honors community and celebrates difference, one that resists the homogenizing force of assimilation.

The son of migrant farmworkers in northern California, Rodriguez’s peripatetic childhood introduced him to a rotating cast of friends, insular groups under whose influence the artist came into himself. These friends, who so evocatively populate the works on view, not only came together for the usual antics and dramas of early adulthood, but also supported each other through the small and large traumas and indignities of poor, rural life. Aguante is full of these kids – teenagers in posed groups or informal portraits, more often than not playacting their most macho, confident personas for the camera’s gaze.

The snapshots of Rodriguez’s Fotos y recuerdos series capture the expanses of unsupervised time that characterized adolescence in the pre-digital age. Teenagers lounge in backyards, double up on bicycles, and flash hand signs as they pose. The images capture young people, many first-generation Americans, coming of age in a world that often felt adversarial and crafting personas to survive. Many of the works include text that reference nicknames and locations, often in tattoo-style script or blocky, stylized lettering of graffiti – writing inherent to the source photographs. Rodriguez archives these particular moments in time, both in his original photography and in the successive reimaginations of the series. The work preserves memories of places long lost to redevelopment and friendships dissolved by time, resisting the coming changes by keeping these stories alive.   

Fashion and music radiated out of Los Angeles and into California’s smaller communities in the 1990s, along with a particular genre of gang culture that pitted native-born Chicanos against those who had immigrated to the United States. Absorbed into this system, Rodriguez found safety within a ride-or-die bond that protected his queerness from outside harassment. Fotos y recuerdos walks a fine line between celebrating gang culture and honoring the feeling of belonging within the group that stood in for wider cultural acceptance.

A set of larger works on paper bring together photographs and clippings from classic teen magazines in collage-style groupings. Poderosas takes its title from a hot pink Teen Angels cover featuring a fierce woman with a shiny black bouffant and long silver hoops. The painting is populated entirely by women, and honors the powerful women in Rodriguez’s life. These larger works bring together cultural touchstones – in the form of magazines such as Teen Angels and Street Life – and the real-world fashion and attitude they inspired. As in the other works, objects depicted seem to lift off the page as Rodriguez’s deftly-executed photorealism brings his long-lost subjects crackling back to life.