Raoul Rodriguez: An Artist for the People

The bulk of Raoul Rodriguez’s artistic works are composed of drawings and communal projects with UGAT-Lahi artist collective and various peoples’ organizations.

As an individual, Rodriguez's peregrine and diverse itinerary as a full-time cultural worker compels him to create on transportable formats: such as sketchbooks and small-scale canvases or paper that can be transferred from place to place.

His studio is wherever the struggle to 'serve the people' takes him: picket lines, urban poor and peasant communities, churches, and other arenas of cultural intervention.

His observations and wanderings are chronicled in the series entitled mga kwento mula sa ibaba – an ongoing visual journal of ball-point pen drawings on paper and studies on acrylic. The artist utilizes ball-point pens because of the inexpensive, unobtrusive, and accessible character of the medium.

Mga bagay na kadalasang nakikita pero hindi nabibigyang pansin as the artist terms them, comprises the artist's imagery and subjects. In a country where poverty and political disturbances are a prevalent sight, the artist goes beyond the act of documenting and reflecting grim social realities, and proceeds to interpret them through figurative expressionism. In this way, Rodriguez captures complex historical phenomenon that may not always be easily represented through a naturalistic depiction of perceivable reality.

Rodriguez produces vistas or postcards from the periphery: a visual anthology of histories from the marginalized. Images recalled from various sites of dissent populate his works. His subjects are the people with whom he directly interacts with, listens to, and organizes: downtrodden workers and farmers, the disenfranchised and unemployed, the individual faces of the poor majority and the convoluted throng of crowds.

Conversely, Rodriguez juxtaposes these sympathetic and intimate depictions of the masses with representations of oppressive entities. He frames the entire landscape and narrative of struggles between them. He makes tangible the enemy, makes their faces known to the viewer: landlords, local elite, the agents of US imperialism.

Rodriguez has also participated in collective installation works with UGAT-Lahi since 1999, and started producing individual installations since 2004. These installations and performances have encompassed themes such as transnational breeding of docile labor forces Hybrid (2004), the Hacienda Luisita massacre of November 16, 2005, the appalling disparities between consumerism and mass starvation Mc Pagpag (2004), and contemporary Philippine fascism Acolytes (2005). He has also explored producing “collages” of mounted and painted plywood cut-outs since 2004.

From 1994 up to the present, the bulk of Rodriguez' artistic energies have been channeled into the collective productions of UGAT-Lahi: in its effigies, street murals, collaborative paintings, and workshops.

The artist believes in the power of collective effort, whether in politics, or art. Rejecting the notion that art is created solely for its own sake, by a solitary genious in a space devoid of context and audience, Rodriguez and other cultural workers strive for the community’s involvement in each process and part of art-making.

For Rodriguez and other cultural workers, the masses are not mere subjects of static works of art. They value and aspire for the audience’s participation in art, not as mere awed spectators but as active collaborators.

The artist believes that the consummation of protest art lies in its ability to strategically intervene in the struggles of its day: whether as moving images of social realities or interactive works in popular forms.

Rodriquez also engages in instructional work through art workshops for children, mainly in cooperation with the Children’s Rehabilitation Center (CRC). Such workshops comprise part of the CRC’s program of psycho-social therapy for children victimized and traumatized by militarization in the countryside. In these sites of learning, the artist aims to infuse more than mere rudimentary technical knowledge and attempts to aid in the healing process.