Gathering all kinds of materials and giving room to multiple formal solutions, media and work procedures, Ricardo Rendón’s work functions as a complex diary where the actions are recorded, documented and accumulated in the transformation and manipulation of the materials and the working place.

 

Ricardo Rendón (Mexico City 1970) has achieved several international awards and recognitions, his works have been exhibited at the Reina Sofía Museum, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Videobrasil, Videolisboa, UCSD University Art Gallery, Maison Rouge in Paris, Museo Experimental El Eco, Museo Tamayo, MUAC Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Museo de Arte Moderno and Laboratorio Arte Alameda in Mexico City. His work is part of important contemporary art collections such as the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation CIFO, Sayago & Pardon Collection, The Bank of America, Progressive Art Collection, La Colección Jumex, the Isabel & Agustin Coppel Collection, Fondation Daniel Langlois and MUAC Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo. He is member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores. Rendón is represented by Arróniz Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City, Galería Nueveochenta in Bogotá and Zipper Galeria in São Paulo Brazil and Galeria Espaciominimo in Madrid. Lives and works in Mexico City.

 

“His works are an appendix of construction or destruction practices that enunciate the moment where things happen, forms that propose the action as leitmotiv”. David Miranda, Museo Experimental El Eco, Mexico City 2007.

“Ricardo Rendón proposes an epic that assaults architectures and objects equally. Its working project establishes a direct dialogue with the capital gain originated by the difference between the wages paid to the worker and the value generated by its manpower within the capitalist system. It is a query on the work and its sense by means of the experience. A narrative that the artist establishes leaving in most cases the waste of its activities within the place of intervention: swept to a corner, gathered inside a transparent container or scattered around the working site. Thus, he proposes a gesture that alludes to its procedure, a commemoration of every moment destined to the production of the capital gain.

His work includes reflections that go from the micro to the macro, continuously restituting the work of the artist by its execution in a direct dialogue with the edification – construction. Rendón constructs an aesthetic derived from the Hegelian dialectic of the master and the slave, determining that the truly free individual will be the slave. This last one is who works with the objects, learning to be different from them by its manipulation and transformation”. Lourdes Morales, Mexico City 2009.

 

“In his works, Ricardo Rendón proposes a renaissance in reverse that emphasizes manual work, and exposes the worker face of conceptual art, that which values the process and the

singularity of each gesture. Rendon demonstrates the metaphysics of things in the things themselves, it is within the work, in that which can be seen and touched, and in its process of creation, that the thought generated by the work remains”.

Paula Braga, São Paulo 2013.

 

 

STATEMENT

 

From the point of view of the arts I try to reflect in the moment where the work is created, the experience of the transformation of the working space and the working materials. In that sense, my work behave as a memoir or document where all the creative moments are registered and accumulated, the moment when things happen.

 

Therefore, I decide to think on the exhibition space as a scenery for work, for example the transformation of the gallery in a working environment, from the walls to the working materials, my practice is determined by the social and physical conditions of the space and it’s own possible materials.

 

My work is designed as a system of inquiry into creative practice. It is a search for meaning that not only uncovers motivation, answering the question of why to create, but also permits a critical appraisal of the role of the subject who performs personal work. Reassessing the creative process allows me to make sense of making art through experiencing its continual realization.

 

It consists of determining my subjective reality and setting in motion my creative faculties, which enable the emergence of new understandings. In this way, experience, consisting of the development and accumulation of moments of creation, informs my strategic orientation towards my surroundings. Accordingly, I recognize that as the subject of creative doing, I am shaped by possibilities, events, dialogues and interpretations in a place of continual transformation, a setting of action and experience in which creative activity is restricted only by the physical limits of workspace and materials.

 

Ricardo Rendón.