When is a human no longer a human? When is the body no longer a body? These questions have been turned over by all manner of modern philosophers, from abortion activists to judges handling necrophilia cases to science fiction filmmakers. Now Mexican-American artist Rodrigo Ramírez Rodríguez enters their ranks. In “Lonely Never Knows Jealousy, Only Despair,” Rodríguez uses painting, sculpture, and the negative space of the gallery to make manifest our collective anxieties surrounding intimacy and longing. Indebted to German expressionism as much as contemporary horror, the exhibition excavates the grotesque from desire without forgetting what makes it so appealing in the first place.
The ethereal figures in Rodríguez’s paintings push against loneliness with every inch of their indiscriminate frames. Formed with sweeping pale strokes, they appear as ghosts—people present emotionally but not physically, or vice versa. Abstracted bodies can be difficult to depict: some artists lean toward overly literal poses, resulting in figures that are abstract in style but not in concept, while others obscure their real or imagined subjects into oblivion, creating orgiastic jumbles that leave little room for relational allegory. Rodríguez’s subjects, by contrast, leave room for mystery in their surreal choreography. Desperate for closeness, even if imperfect, their non-limbs melt into each other, creating new entities.
In some cases, the emotion is too great to be constrained to the canvas. Take Rodríguez’s That’s what wanting love is series, featuring sculptural protrusions whose irregular textures practically beg the beholder to break the touch barrier. In a work subtitled The only cure from agony, a white appendage made of metal, resin, and gauze dangles from a pitch-black backdrop, resembling a cocoon or a phallus (which can seem equally alien in some contexts). In Cause Nothingness was Somethingness: For someone who didn’t want it, in which two lovers (?) are bound by a viscous white thread. Are we eyeing bodily fluid, ectoplasm, some supernatural soul tie? Through the gaze of the yearner, what’s the difference?
Rodríguez’s larger installations feature slick-looking membranes stretched over steel—and yet, contending with their immediacy as one tiptoes around the gallery, it is impossible not to react to them as if they were fashioned with decaying bones. Your shadow at evening rising to meet you, hanging from a door, resembles a scene from an abattoir; another sculpture, splayed out on the ground, evokes a corpse, although a faint light emanating from within suggests the achievement of some postmortem solace. Paired with the paintings, they remind the beholder that whether or not one subjects oneself to the humiliations of tenderness, they’ll meet the same fate as all their fellow men.
In the midst of writing this review, I was notified of Murmurs’s imminent closing. Rodríguez’s exhibition, it turns out, was the gallery’s last. How serendipitous that the show should gesture towards both the vulnerability of sensitive skin and the spiritual staying power of sensate memories—The Body Keeps the Score in a void, or in the world of Videodrome. Long live the new flesh, and the old flesh, too.
