Rodríguez Calero

"El Museo del Barrio's 'Urban Martyrs and Latter-Day Santos' is the first museum survey of the Nuyorican artist Rodríguez Calero and the second in a series of five women-artist retrospectives in El Museo's current five-year plan. Rodríguez Calero forges her powerful and unique style from the richly varied traditions of her own background. Availing herself of both classical and deeply contemporary elements including surrealist collage, Catholic iconography, medieval religious painting, and hip-hop street culture, Rodríguez Calero creates vibrant and multilayered canvasses that def easy categorization. Her work offers a masterful balance of the abstract and figurative, sacred and profane, the meditative and boldly graphic. Rodríguez Calero's original technique is called 'acrollage', a technique of layering glazes of luminous colors with rice and other kinds of paper. The blending of fermenting surfaces and stenciled patterns attains lustrous color and texture. Guest-curated by Alejandro Anreus, the installation includes 29 large acrolalge canvases, 19 smaller collages, 13 fotacrolés (altered photograph) on canvas board, and 3 works of mixed media on paper.