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Javier M. Rodríguez - Plot points and the Inciting Incident
With a broad cinematic background embedded in his processes, Javier M. Rodríguez has created a recent body of work that explores the materiality of the moving image and reflects on the presentation of its narrative contents. However, the artist seems to confront the inciting incident of his own work: a breaking point with the technical possibilities of cinema in pursuit of a dialogue with other formats of the artwork. In this sense, Plot Points and the Inciting Incident combines the idea of expanded cinema that has permeated his recent works with the search for a precise material anchoring. It is a process of translation that emerges from cinematic language and finds a new vocabulary in sculpture, image-printing processes, and projection itself.
The ways in which printed images transform through the effects of time upon materials have been one of the constant concerns in M. Rodríguez’s work: pieces that begin as monochromes and eventually reveal figurative contents. In this vein, A Character Who Sleeps translates a camera movement that will be completed over the years through the processes of wear affecting printing inks. Similarly, But When You Came It Was Too Late appeals to the oxidation and deterioration of copper in order to reveal hidden images through temporality.
On the other hand, the artist opens a discussion around the supports onto which moving images are projected. In Conchita, the print of a black-and-white still frame serves as the screen receiving the images of two actresses performing the same role in a two-color compendium. For A Film for a Book, the pages of a book collect visual poems when a feature film is subjected to a translation into editorial language.
M. Rodríguez reflects on the nature of movement in cinema with Degrees of Fiction, a stack of paper prints showing a pan following the trajectory of a character. The video revisits the principle that cinematic fiction is created through movement: a continuous succession of still images. This formal consideration extends into Three Moments in Film, a metal structure alluding to a film reel. The sculptural assemblage houses a rigid and tensioned print (image), a dye-sublimated fabric hanging with cadence (movement), and a plaster head resting within the contour (depth).
Finally, Trema is another nod toward sculptural language that reinforces the aspirations of the Italian Neorealist movement through the use of a material of natural origin.
Approaching the moving image through its technical foundations and theoretical principles, M. Rodríguez manages to sketch out the plot that could—or could not—resolve what begins with this inciting incident. What remains, for now, is a cliffhanger.