CLASSICO
The CLASSICO serie takes on paintings by the masters (Velasquez, Rubens, El Greco, Goya, Manet, and more) - "quoting" them in a citational approach with its own specific rules. The purpose is not to plagiarize, nor to simply duplicate the works: the cropping systematically focuses on a character, often redefining the center of gravity of the original image: from two paintings by Georges de La Tour (The Fortune Teller and The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs), the painter keeps only the woman and her face; in Velasquez's Las Meninas, he leaves the famous game of mirrors to concentrate on the bust of the Infanta. These representations, which have passed through the history of art to become cultural icons as well-known as Warhol's Marilyn, return to the canvas and immediately undergo shock treatment: the hybridization of two paintings, or the application of irreverent brush strokes. The painter literally attacks these works, which have haunted his artistic life since his drawing classes as a young man at the Granada school of fine arts. Through the eyes of their characters, haven't these masterpieces been challenging all painters, for centuries, to dare to attempt figurative art? Francisco Rodriguez del Canto's response can be expressed in a physiological metaphor: to grow and move forward we must take nourishment from our models, assimilate them, digest them, and dissolve them in their own pictorial juices. Swallow so as not to be swallowed, as it were. But the gesture of the artist, liberating for its own ends, seems also to liberate these characters, shut away in masterpieces like cultural tombs. Isolating and magnifying the faces of these men and women, whether anonymous models or historical figures, means turning this daunting dialogue with the classics into an exchange between two faces, two people. Despite the suffocating weight of art history, these paintings seem to say that art must remain an inter-personal affair.