This new and exciting website displays numerous acclaimed grand manner narrative murals created in Florida and Maryland; as well as displaying imaginative and bravura easel-paintings in oil (including intricate figurative groups, insightful portraits, intimate still-lifes, monumental landscapes and vedute). In addition, presented in the new website are RodeiroÂ’s virtuoso watercolors, dazzling sepia-studies, innovative gouaches and assorted classical contour-drawings, as well as extraordinary mixed-media works: amazars. All of the above works are circumspectly categorized and critically described within the website by Irish art critic, Tara Dervla, who places RodeiroÂ’s art in context within the following eight web-galleries: Amnesis Gallery; Amazar Gallery; Bodegones Gallery; Grand Manner Gallery; Watercolor Gallery; Promordialism Gallery; Landscape & Vedute Gallery, and Drawing Gallery.
Throughout the 1980s until the mid-1990s, Rodeiro tried to generate a grand manner narrative mural tradition in Florida and Maryland. These spectacular grand manner murals included the following: The Landing of Desoto in Tampa Bay, oil-on-wood, 24’ x 4,’ 1980, Tampa Convention Center, Harbour Island; Tampa the Cradle of Cuban Independence, enamel-on-mdo board(s), 40’ x 20,’ 1990 (Property of the City of Tampa); The Ransoming of Frederick, 8’ x 24’ oil-on-wood, 1992 (Property of Walkersville High School (MD)), as well as creating other historical grand-manner murals. In the late-20th Century, Rodeiro was one of a handful of American Latino muralists, who explored the possibility of spawning a grand manner narrative historical mural tradition within the USA; a partial list of these innovative and courageous muralists includes: Judy Baca, Eloy Torrez, John Valadez, Emanuel Martinez, Xavier Cortada and East Los Streetscapers. Most forms of US Late-20th Century muralism derive from the early-20th Century Mexican Muralist’s traditions, especially Los Tres Grandes (Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros) and generally manifested geographically in the far West. After several trips to Mexico in the 1970s, Rodeiro discovered the Mexican Neo-Renaissance murals of Saturnino Herrán and Juan O’Gorman, which he preferred over the style of Los Tres Grandes. Apparent in the new website’s Grand Manner Gallery are Rodeiro’s allusions to Herrán’s and O’Gorman’s Neo-Renaissance murals.
In terms of his revolutionary easel works, in 1974, Rodeiro was the first artist to create an Amnesis painting (The 1st Violin of Amnesia oil-on--canvas, 27” x 36,” 1974, Collection of Dr. S. Kim, Cumberland, MD), directly alluding to the highly perceptive and ground-breaking aesthetic theories of Dr. Nicomedes Suárez-Araúz (the acclaimed Bolivian poet-theorist), who advocated that “amnesia” plays a dominant role in artistic creativity. From 1986-1988, Rodeiro and Suárez-Araúz continued their prolific collaboration in Sarriá, Barcelona, Spain, where Rodeiro began to incorporate push/pull images of dinosaurs throughout his amnesis-painting, becoming the first major fine-artist to consistently utilize dinosaurs as subject-matter. Also, at this time, Suárez-Araúz and Rodeiro simultaneously formulated a new 2-D method of working, which Suárez-Araúz named amazar(s) that ingeniously generates images through kneading, mono-printing, “chance” re-manipulations, and unconscious rearrangements of 2-D detritus from other works. Scores of extraordinary amazars grace the new website’s Amazar Gallery.
In 1989, Rodeiro was the first and only US artist to challenge the Reagan/Bush embargo against Nicaragua, by going to Nicaragua and bringing back to the Mid-Atlantic region hundreds of art works by significant Nicaraguan artists. Rodeiro curated the exhibition and wrote the catalogue entitled Nicaraguan Contemporary Art (Frostburg, MD: Stephanie Ann Roper Gallery Publication, 1990). This show travelled to major museums and galleries in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Washington, DC; and scores of paintings sold, compensating beleaguered Nicaraguan artists. In 1990, President Bush lifted the embargo. RodeiroÂ’s catalogue text became the definitive art historical source on the topic, appearing in Spanish in Nuevo Amanecer Cultural, Managua, Nicaragua, Ano XII, 1991. In fact, RodeiroÂ’s text is often cited by all other significant authors writing about Nicaraguan contemoporary art. RodeiroÂ’s other art historical writings are available via the Library of Congress, and many titles and key texts are listed in the new websiteÂ’s BIO-page.
In 2001, Rodeiro was the first America artists to creatively respond to the 9/11 attacks, finding in those attacks direct correlations to the April 26, 1937 attack on Guernica, during the Spanish Civil War. Within the new website, there are several powerful and poignant works that emotionally relate to the twin-towers of the World Trade Center as well as to the dreadful and painful 9/11 attacks at “Ground Zero.” In the Landscape and Vedute Gallery, one watercolor image of the World Trade Center was painted in Liberty State Park, Jersey City (NJ) two years before the attack. In this image, Rodeiro prophetically renders the twin towers as ‘ghosts of light.’ By creating a series of 9/11 works that are strewn about the new website, including 9/11, oil-on-canvas, 56” x 48,” 2001 (Collection of the artist); Burn Unit, 18" x 24," watercolor, 2004. (Collection of Oscar B. Cintas Foundation) The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, Florida International University. Miami, Florida; Fireman, amazar-materials, 8" x 11," 2001 (Collection of Ella Rue), and others, Rodeiro instantly knew that the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, was the defining moment of our lives.
Boulder Web Marketing
Jose Rodeiro
973 845 9078 jrodeiro@aol.com
