Francisco Rodriguez

Francisco Rodriguez’s work focuses mainly on painting and drawing on canvas and paper. The characters and scenes he produces explore themes of loneliness, alienation and violence. While the characters originate from personal sensations and experiences, he hopes that they become universal in materialising them through painting, and inviting the viewer to consider how the scenes he present relate to their own subjectivities.

The idea for Francisco Rodriguez’s paintingDogsderives from some of the artist’s earliest memories of his birthplace, Santiago, the capital of Chile. The landscape of Santiago changed dramatically during the Pinochet dictatorship in the late 20th century; with small industries and residential areas being broken up, in pursuit of changing Chile from a social-democratic economy to a neoliberal one. During the 1990s, many of these small industrial areas were desolate, and roaming stray dogs could be found gathered together in the middle of wastelands.