THE EYE OF THE DRAGONFLY
by Amilkar Feria Flores
The first time I sneaked into Roger’s workshop, I recognized, at first glance, the work of someone who moves unceremoniously through the diverse confines of optical art, abstraction, and a methodical and insatiable search for the authenticity of the chromatic nature.
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In our first encounters, and with the maturity of someone who knows what he is doing, we discussed about the impressionists and expressionists: Piet Mondrian, Victor Vasarely and Chuck Close, among other presumable influences that could be noticed in his canvases. Back then, at the end of 2008, my interlocutor was doing a job that, for any layman, or another artist less given to meticulousness (in any case I include myself) exasperated because of the elaborateness of its purpose.
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Fabrics covered with grays and blacks and some others that stood out by their bright primary colors, recently taken out of the tube, got stretched in square stretchers of different sizes -from twenty-five centimeters to just under a meter, and joined with the accuracy of a cabinet-maker. The most astonishing thing about it, after nosing around with insistent curiosity, was to discover that, after being shaped separately, they were put together like a huge puzzle where neutrals and primaries were adjusted to a second creative program.
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I would label Roger’s workspace an optical research lab, but only in the first place. Behind this virtual “game” of settings, which seemed to superficially entertain its creator, was hidden the meticulous practice of someone who from his physiological ability to discern the differences between the almost imperceptible nuances used, articulates a deep perception of contrasts, perfectly transferable to an emotional state, to the growth of a tree, to the outbreak of a Supernova, or to the mere pause that the breathing of a volunteer makes during clinical tests of Pulmonology.
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In the young artist from Camaguey, who is now studying the fourth level in the specialty of Painting, there are abundant logical algorithmic and mathematical referents, structuring thoughts that better construct architectural elements, according to his own vision of the matter (obviously the most genuine).
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To shoot the first stone at an unsuspecting spectator, it is extremely challenging for the senses. After getting familiar with the different shades, each one takes home a reading as dissimilar as the one that its author has proposed himself, as creative rhetoric.
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It is almost impossible to ignore his workshop once we got used to chatting at his dome about any random conversation topic. Now, and for almost a year, Roger's grids have been resolved on the same pictorial surface, seeking in the border complicity of two types of gray, cold-warm, the answer to a concern of a vertebral and nanometric nature; that could perfectly be the impression that a dragonfly would have of a random morning.
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