Horror Vacui – new works by Diego Rodriguez-Warner

previous arrow
next arrow
Slider

Photo Credit: Amanda Tipton Photography

DIEGO RODRIGUEZ-WARNER – HORROR VACUI

Artist Statement

This show is a bit of a mess.

Like many of you, I have spent the last eight months secluded, and didn’t leave the house for the first three. I did what I know how to do, making images with the materials I had at hand, scraps of plywood and drywall, crayons, pencil and spray paint, a diminishing supply of acrylic paint. I quickly gave up on responding to an omnipresent and ever shifting news cycle, an impossible chase. With a singular exception, I found it nigh impossible to summon past grandiosity, instead focusing on smaller, more intimate pieces. Turning inward as a form of respite, working out of a delirious hope to distract, to keep busy, to give myself purpose in a world falling apart.

I feel like we are passing through a collective chrysalis, an upturned caged domesticity. As I paced a rut in my backyard, so too I found myself returning to the same dead ends in my studio. Erudite gestures of casual indifference, airy contentious groups, ruptured single figures, these crumpled anxious odalisques.

I am hesitant to call them studies, as a study insinuates that anything will come of them. Instead, to borrow a term from my friend Artur Pena, I like attempts. Attempts to occupy myself, attempts to find interest, to excite my eye, to fill the space new people and experiences would have inhabited. I can’t let go of the feeling that this is far less than you deserve, and for that I apologize, but it is my hope that you find me as I am, somewhere in the gesture.

Love,

Diego

Photo Credit: Amanda Tipton Photography


Ray Rinaldi’s review in Hyperallergic:
https://hyperallergic.com/610544/diego-rodriguez-warner-horror-vacui-leon-gallery/


Joshua Ware in SW Contemporary Magazine:

Barth Quenzer writes on Horror Vacui:


Our Executive Director, Eric G. Nord, shares some of his thoughts on Diego’s extraordinary artwork here:

The Dynamism of Diego Rodriguez-Warner


Eric R. Dallimore, Leon’s Artistic Director shares his thoughts here: