Luis Alberto Rodriguez

• Loose Joints 2023
• Hardback, 1st edition
• Imperfect - see below
  

Mysticism, spirituality and corporeal liberation meet in the studio for Rodriguez’s powerful new series exploring control, purity and identity.

In O., acclaimed Dominican-American artist Luis Alberto Rodriguez strips down his choreographed, embodied approach to photography through a series that explores the free-fall of life, the construction of identity, and their connections with spiritual destiny. Influenced by French mystic thinker Simone Weil, Rodriguez draws a line between his stripped-down portraits and Weil’s life’s work, in search of purity and the relationship between suffering and transcendence. The title of the book – the letter O – speaks to this transcendence – between a noise, a gasp, an exhale, a cycle, all sounds, an open symbol, a zero, a reset.

Using a cast of different bodies, ages, backgrounds and identities, Rodriguez sculpts a series of nudes oscillating between power and a loss of control. Rodriguez challenges his subjects to let go: bodies contort and collapse while returning to poise, lifting to grace, and reaching into purity. How much control do we have over the direction we are headed? How soft is the landing?

Rodriguez frames his striking nudes in dialogue with images of tasseography – the practice of divination through coffee-cup reading that runs through Rodriguez’s Dominican heritage – to spiritually engage with the force and beauty of those who appear, and disappear, before his camera. O. envokes the volatility of our current moment, our states of self-preservation, and the future that is yet to come.

Imperfect: Small bump to rear corner - pages inside unaffected. See photo.

• Loose Joints 2020
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

People of the Mud is a powerful new series by Berlin-based US-Dominican artist Luis Alberto Rodriguez, made collaboratively amongst the communities of County Wexford in Ireland, where ancient tradition and modern life rub shoulders daily.

With a background in professional dance, Rodriguez’s work pays tribute to the metaphorical weight of centuries of physical labour behind cultivating the landscape and maintaining cultural heritage. Images of scarred limbs and hands, weathered faces and choreographed bodies appear as a cartography of this labour, reflecting how culture both shapes and is shaped by individuals. Elsewhere, we see the exaggerated glamour of modern female Irish dancers taken out of the glitzy ballrooms and into the fields, creating a rupture across time and space.

While in Wexford, Rodriguez was struck by the intense physicality of the sport of hurling. Considered to be the fastest sport on grass, while watching slow-motion footage of hurling Rodriguez saw that within seconds the players would go through pushing, shoving, grabbing, hugging, knocking each other down and then lifting one another up. Rodriguez worked with players to reform these gestures: creating sculptures out of bodies, directing and literally layering players upon one another.