Eugenio Rodríguez Rodríguez

Sculptor, Goldsmith

Despite his brief artistic career spanning less than three decades of creation, Eugenio Rodríguez is also an indispensable name in the history of Cuban sculpture, perhaps because his work summarizes and illustrates, with a high level of representativeness, the ideological and aesthetic paths that sculpture followed in our country during the intense forties, fifties, and sixties of the twentieth century.

He studied at the Academy of San Alejandro, where he was a student of sculptor Juan José Sicre. Here he surely received the imprint of those peculiar "academic" professors who turned out to be the initiators of national sculpture. So, while he learned to model forms based on classical canons and to copy the model, earning outstanding grades in each class exercise, he also became acquainted with and practiced direct carving in stone and wood, discovered the unlimited potential of form to break the margins of realistic representation, and prepared himself for the fruitful encounter with the aesthetic proposal that European Bernard Reeder would bring to Cuba during his passage through the island in 1941, precisely the year Eugenio Rodríguez graduated from San Alejandro.

His first notable participation in the capital's exhibition circuit took place in 1944, as an exponent of the now anthological show Presence of Six Sculptors, regarding which critic Guy Pérez Cisneros wrote a substantial essay that would come to support his theses about a generational confrontation between two successive and different generations of Cuban visual arts. Already in the previous year, the scholar had pointed out when referring, in particular, to the new batch of sculptors, Eugenio Rodríguez included, entering the artistic arena, that many of these young people "who followed the quiet stylized routine of their previous masters" were beginning to "fully launch into the search for the most powerful force of expression: that of forms."

Led by the already mature and striking Alfredo Lozano Peiruga, and in the company of contemporary talents such as José Núñes Booth, Rodulfo Tardo, Rolando Gutiérrez, and Roberto Estopiñán, Eugenio proved to be a follower of that Reederian aesthetic that fully unfolded in the countless terracotta female figures he created throughout the forties. Within that area of his production lies Woman on Horseback (1944).

In this work, as in most of those Eugenio created during this period, one perceives interest in the roundness of form, in the solid stability of volume, in the immanent proportion of sculptural mass—all features aimed at emphasizing timelessness, concentration, balance, and plastic synthesis.

Toward the end of the forties, desirous of completing his studies and broadening his cultural horizons, he secured a trip to Mexico and the United States, from where he returned in 1952. When called upon to participate in the sculptural decoration of the Fine Arts building, he conceived an exceptional piece executed in oxyacetylene bronze, The Creation, which illuminates the path traveled in just a few years and the gains from that journey through North America: the artist had definitively surpassed that stage of solid, compact, and volumetric forms and had devoted himself, with singular ease, to the free play of light and shadow, to the multidirectional dynamics of forms and intersections, to the autonomy, now truly full, of the purest expression.

In the subsequent years, he incorporates into his versatile practice the use of new materials and procedures, among which iron and other metals stand out, which soon led him down the fascinating paths of goldsmithing. His sculptures increasingly moved toward structural lightness and slender lines, which harmoniously connected him with the abstractionist tendency that was experiencing a moment of true fullness in Cuban painting and sculpture.

He participated in various collective exhibitions in Cuba. He also exhibited at the University of Tampa and in the Cuban Woodcut Salons in Mexico City. Among his best-known works is one of the sculptural groups that decorate the exterior of the Museum of Fine Arts. Other works by the artist include: "Fugue," created in iron, "Abstraction," in wood, and "Motif," a bas-relief. He died in Havana on October 21, 1968.