Peat is a dark, spongy, organic material made up of decaying plant matter; though amorphous, it stubbornly spreads out to occupy time and space.

In Antes, la fatiga (“Formerly, fatigue”) RODRÍGUEZ-MÉNDEZ has used peat to cover eleven flexible structures that will expand until being overcome by rigidity. These pieces are fit in between the gallery’s ceiling and floor; they stain and scratch, they leave traces and residues: a testament to the violence with which they have been hauled about, to attempts both failed and successful.

For RODRÍGUEZ-MÉNDEZ, this material extends into language as well, scattering ideas and contradictions, evoking difficult-to-name emotions. Somewhere between action and sculpture, his pieces emerge out of a controlled disorder. The artist pushes this chaos to the limit, fully aware that he might fail, because it is there, in that uncertainty, where his practice resides. This interval, this space and time adjacent to the fall, to illness, is an antidote for urgency,^[1] producing an estrangement that, paradoxically, heightens our awareness. It brings us closer, as the author himself reminds us,^[2] to the meaning of “duration” as understood by Peter Handke: “as an event of attending to, / an event of contemplation”.^[3]

This state is induced through the repetition of gestures; insistence acts like a mantra, like a prayer. One of RODRÍGUEZ-MÉNDEZ’s acts of insistence is to install his peat-covered structures in spaces in which they decidedly do not fit. We find further acts of insistence in his series of photographs, which are the result of variations on a reiterated request – a question that grows more pertinent with each asking, although never quite enough.

Twenty-four black-and-white photographs are arrayed along one of the gallery’s walls. They depict twenty-four feathers found by the artist in different locations, and which he bent along the shaft on site. His pictures are like words searching for a code, like intermittent knocks on a door trying to tap out a message. But the bent shafts render useless the feather’s sole function; the search for answers is cut short, in each image, by a failure and a wound. The piece comes to an end, exhausted, when intuition finds that the discourse has run its course.

There is uncertainty and resignation in these endings, which are never definitive, and this is equally the value of the artist book that is also part of the show. Again, the pictures of the feathers, and with them six series of black-and-white pictures that have never before been shown.

“…romper uma palavra e passar”^[1]. Each one of RODRÍGUEZ-MÉNDEZ’s series – these images that come together in verse, these knocks on the door – seeks to rip through the surface, not to destroy it but to understand it. In her book Carrusel, Berta Dávila narrates how, after accidentally falling into a pond, she came to understand that “the beginning and end of things are entities that touch across either side of the surface” and that she cannot escape “the desire to poke at the surface tension until it gives.”^[2] RODRÍGUEZ-MÉNDEZ is constantly disturbing this same surface, probing with his hands to discover what lies on the other side. The seven series of photographs are distributed throughout the book at different heights to form a staircase. Each one is a step, a knock at the door, a call, a new attempt to break a word.

RODRÍGUEZ-MÉNDEZ tells us that everything has already happened, in the past, that our bodies are exhausted from our dogged insistence, from our failures – but still they can’t help coming back for more. Antes, la fatiga is a compendium of past acts of insistence that have broken through the surface, and that offer us at least a glimpse of what lies on the other side.

Ana González Chouciño

1 Manuel Segade, Carlos Rodrígez Méndez. Situación, CGAC, 2008
2 Ángel Calvo Ulloa, Carlos Rodríguez Méndez. “La duración en el término,” Dardo Magazine 25, 2014
3 Peter Handke. trans. Scott Abbott. To Duration, The Last Books, 2015 (1986).
4 “break a word and move on”; Herberto Helder, “Poemas completos”. Série Grandes Escritores, Rio de Janeiro: Editora Tinta-da-China, 2016
5 Berta Dávila, Carrusel. Editorial Galaxia, 2019