Visual Arts

Lorena Rodriguez’s Artist Statement:
A new stage in my life began when my nephew and my niece (Daniel and Carola) were born, I started to paint with them and learn from them, and started to get in touch again with comics and cartoons. I realised that I wanted to do art that can reach children as well as adults. I went for a period of time to NY and had the opportunity to visit Jeff Koons atelier and learnt that art doesn’t always have to be dark, even if the concept that supports it is. The form or the image doesn’t have to be depressing and dense and artists can use toys, colour and joyful images to tell the stories. The superheroes paintings started with a trip to Jamaica where I had a bad experience with someone I trusted, this was a life experience for me. After all of this I was in a really bad shape, very depressed, but I realise that we cannot control what happens to us but we can control how we react to what happens to us. With this I decided that I was better than that and began to draw to a close the way I used to paint realistic girls in my paintings. I now represent the state of mind I had by painting them in gray shades, and I have replaced the girls I used to paint with new super heroes that later on I decided to call “Super Sheroes” after hearing the American writer Maya Angelou using that therm.
I was working on my Mexican 3 Moments exhibition – a recent exhibition with State-of-the-arts Foundation, displaying works that give the insights of 3 Mexican artists on 3 historical moments of Mexican history – with two painter friends and a curator friend while the insecurity in Mexico increased. During that time I also made a conceptual piece involving children and I realised that these children were the future and I started to wonder when do they loose their innocence and become good or bad people? I realised that education is the key to saving Mexico and indeed the world, in regards to any issue: pollution, war, insecurity, etc. I also realised that children are very fond of Superheroes and that they believe that they have super powers. My family and I were kidnapped recently and discovered that we are stronger than we thought we were, we came out of this situation as even better people. I can understand that one never knows how they would react to something like that until they are there, that is when we discover our “superpowers.” So I wanted to show in my paintings that the real heroes are normal people who do extraordinary things. They do this in part so that children can understand that we have the power to be our own supherheroes, that they mustn’t make wrong choices by wanting things too easily, especially when they discover they don’t have what they first believed superpowers to be. Nowadays with the violence around the world, we, the “normal” people, are the superheroes.
This exhibition is about hope and planning for the future, largely through education and the younger generation. When they realise that they have the power to live right and make change, they will see that we will all have the ability to be superheroes.