Reviews

Marianne de Tolentino / ADCA – AICA / Director of the National Gallery of Fine Arts /  2022 / National

The diversity is immense, especially in painting and, often, among the stylistic modalities, several can coexist in the same professional itinerary that becomes a true artistic anthology. The author’s motivations are located in the development of art in space and time, multiplying and, at the same time, true to themselves, their integrity, and their own value. The reason is simple: it reflects the evolution of personality and temperament. A way of living, thinking, and creating, which expresses the edge of the years.

We do not usually start the comment on an artist and the presentation of his works in an almost retrospective solo exhibition, with an apparently general approach … However, we believe it fair and necessary, when that artist is Enriquillo Rodríguez Amiama, who has treated the genres considered as traditional – still life, landscape, portrait-, and has taken them to a contemporary context.

His professional biography, paradoxically shared between passion and peace, explain the path traveled. We will follow it, from the beginning to today, in a brief synthesis.

Enriquillo Rodríguez Amiama’s vocation for art awakened from his childhood when he was a student of the painter Nidia Serra. Your professional training was held at the National School of Fine Arts and at the University Autonomous of Santo Domingo.

If he has stood out since his first personal show and then in several collective and individual art galleries, Enriquillo soon agreed to museums: Museum of Modern Art (Santo Domingo}, Cándido Bidó Museum (Bonao). His international projection led him to exhibit in Canada, United States, Guatemala, Chile, Costa Rica, Panama, Argentina, in different countries in Europe, and even South Korea.

Especially, he was proud of his “youth show” at the BankDevelopment Conference in Washington, and he cared so much about his career abroad that went twelve years without presenting a solo exhibition in the Dominican Republic. The exhibition at CODIA and the month of January 2021 mark an expected reintegration!

The still lifes of Enriquillo Rodríguez Amiama, with his famous mangoes, occupy a very special place, not only in his work but in Dominican painting, where that genre, secularly traditional in its theme and faithfully academic workmanship, was, with exceptions, among the teachers, more youth work, and, in the Generation of 80, we can also consider Enriquillo Rodríguez Amiama an exception.

A mixed style, refined technique, and focused mainly on the classical, would place it in the current of “cultured painting”, for his careful craft.

Enriquillo Rodríguez Amiama has integrated figuration -in landscaping, above all, abstract, lyric, and gestural elements.

Conceptually and aesthetically remarkable, this trait has led to tributes to Dominican and foreign teachers –Marta Chapa was the first. We know that pictorial creation is not born only from representation direct from nature or the artist’s imagination.

May arise from the association with the painting of others provided he re-creates it, re-invents it, and become your own work, identifiable with temperament, invoice, and stamp of the second author.