“What I paint is something that no longer exists,” Francisco Rodríguez says. “Like how the stars we’re looking at are already dead—their light reaches us after they’ve turned to dust.” He describes his practice simply: “I’m painting dust—memories of places that no longer exist.”

Rodríguez’s paintings trace interior feeling through liminal spaces and sensory impressions that resist language: the smell of an orange, adolescent yearning, the trace of a place that survives only in memory. For him, painting reconnects these lineages not as fixed archives but as living impressions, continuously reshaped over time. 

His reference points stretch from Japanese Edo-period printmaking to Chinese horizontal landscape painting and Flemish Renaissance traditions. These visual inheritances inform his flattened compositions and muted palette, which evoke pastoral or dreamlike atmospheres: layers of cool-toned blue and cream punctuated by bursts of primary red and orange. Contemporary figures appear throughout in various states of rest and movement, drifting through domestic scenes less as protagonists than as embodiments of the subconscious.

Rodríguez’s solo exhibition at Baert Gallery, Private Nightmares, extends these themes while introducing a darker emotional register shaped by present-day anxieties. Across this new body of work, figures turn to analog devices as if reaching for a portal of escape from the relentlessness of contemporary media cycles. The paintings grapple with the paradox that the tools meant to connect us often leave us feeling more isolated and divided than ever. 

Rodríguez articulates this ambivalence through suspended moments between childhood and adulthood, interiority and public life, dependence and autonomy. He’s drawn to adolescence for its openness and emotional volatility, qualities that mirror the broader uncertainty of contemporary life. His paintings allow vulnerability and ambiguity to remain translucent.

In No Mercy for Fascism, a teenage girl wears wired headphones and a T-shirt emblazoned with “ZERO,” referencing The Smashing Pumpkins’ 1996 hit and Billy Corgan’s embrace of self-negation as a rebellious refusal of imposed identity. This punk sensibility reverberates throughout the composition: a poster on the wall depicts a strangled snake alongside the phrase “no mercy for fascism,” while a shadowy figure rises behind the girl, pointing in the opposite direction. Together, these elements stage a charged tension between retreat and resistance, interior withdrawal and political refusal.

Rodríguez echoes this emotional register by returning to the visual language of his youth, including hand-drawn Japanese animation, trading cards, and comics. Drawing is foundational to his process, granting so-called “low” aesthetics the same legitimacy as art-historical traditions. Artists like Aya Takano and Peter Doig serve as touchstones for their graphic linework and character-driven figuration.

For Rodríguez, the personal is political. Painting becomes a quiet form of resistance through its intentional return to stillness in a moment defined by urgency and oversaturation. “I’m completely in love with painting,” he says. “Thinking that you can create an image with just dust and oil. That to me is a kind of alchemy.” Through his devotion to vulnerability and material process, Rodríguez’s practice offers both a meditation on the past and a distillation of the present.

Other works, such as The beast, Power outage; Septmber 11th, and Guardians, introduce ominous, shadow-like dogs that symbolize looming danger. For Rodríguez, these figures operate both psychologically and formally: they register as manifestations of anxiety while also asserting themselves as dominant visual forces. Rendered as dense black silhouettes, the dogs absorb surrounding color into their void, overtaking the composition and collapsing spatial depth. With their piercing eyes shining through the darkness, they materialize an emotional state into physical shape, making unease palpable.

Private Nightmares invites viewers into suspended moments in which memory, adolescence, and interiority unfold slowly, countering a contemporary culture that rushes past reflection. In Rodríguez’s hands, painting holds the fragile emotional register of past lives, contemporary chaos, and the soft promise of connection threaded through both.

–Sigourney Schultz