Nuestros territorios quemados

An art book that explores the trajectory in the last 13 years of Rafael Rodríguez, a plastic artist born in Querétaro in 1977, who has been dedicated to the visual arts since he was 21 years old. Member of the National System of Creators (FONCA) since 2014, his work has won several awards and recognitions in the local and national, having been presented in galleries and museums in Mexico, England, Germany, Canada, United States, Spain, Sweden and Austria. By investigating the narrative and conceptual connotations of the work of Rafael Rodríguez, we realize that the book is also an essay on contemporary portraiture. In this sense, Rodriguez's portraits imitate the skin, the humidity of the eyes, the slightest enunciation of a grimace, or the pure destruction of a stain. The materiality of his painting is consubstantial to his expression. His method, which ranges from restraint and restraint, capturing everything that cannot be said to overflowing and uncomfortable, must materialize in a book that is also an album, where each face and each scene belongs to us. Scale, proportions and design are important insofar as each portrait is also a mirror, the invitation to be lost in the gaze of the other, or in the privacy of their possessions. The publication of Our Burnt Territories responds to the need to make available to a wide audience books that explore contemporary painting that is produced in Mexico, that consider special care, attention to detail, texture and color that mimics the work of the painter.