THE THIRD SHORE puts on public view works by Venezuelan artist Juan Carlos Rodríguez, who places at the center of his creative work slowly distilled reflections on social issues that mark, both positively and negatively, the lives of the plains communities ('llaneros') with which the artist has become involved, as in invivencia.
THE THIRD SHORE puts on public view works by Venezuelan artist Juan Carlos Rodríguez, who places at the center of his creative work slowly distilled reflections on social issues that mark, both positively and negatively, the lives of the plains communities ('llaneros') with which the artist has become involved, as in invivencia.
As Margarita Serje recounts in her book "El revés de la nación" [The Nation's Underside], the plains region (Los Llanos), despite its cultural wealth, biodiversity, and subsoil resources, has throughout its history been left in relative abandonment by state institutions, and with it has seen a progressive rise in violence from irregular armed groups, drug trafficking, rural displacement, and, more recently, the migration of Venezuelan llaneros.
The artist responds to that abandonment, to the condition of remoteness, of untamed territories, to the romanticized landscape and the fraught representation of the llanero as "other". He responds based on direct exchange, both with the region's local cultural wealth and with the harsh situations affecting these territories. The works place emphasis on firsthand experience and on the voice of its inhabitants, revealing the intricate cultural reality shared across the binational border ("chimó dialogues," song, and dance, among others) and its stabilizing role in the face of the hardships of the environment. Rodríguez undertakes a process of translating all of this in order to reinsert it, in his own words, "as a transitory passage through the field of art". - Nydia Gutiérrez, Curator