RODRIGO VALENZUELA
Peripheral Gestures
November 16, 2024 - January 11, 2025
OPENING: Saturday, November 16, 2024, 3-5pm
San Francisco, CA — EUQINOM Gallery is delighted to present Peripheral Gestures, its second solo exhibition with Chilean-born, Los Angeles-based artist Rodrigo Valenzuela. Running from November 16, 2024, through January 11, 2025, the exhibition showcases Valenzuela’s newest works, including his Garabatos photographic series, Muecas white ceramic sculptures, and a selection from his New Land paintings, developed during a residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts.
In Peripheral Gestures, Valenzuela continues his exploration of protest, labor, and the universal bodily language of underground movements. His black-and-white Garabatos series draws inspiration from his research into Latin American subcultures and music scene during the dictatorship years, in the aftermath of Operation Condor, a CIA lead initiative aimed to neutralize socialist agendas in South America by creating a web of cooperation among military regimes. Utilizing archival images, magazines, and films, Valenzuela isolates bodily gestures, transforming these documentary scenes into a unique visual language. By recreating and photographing these movements as abstract sculptures, he conjures a haunting reflection on collective memory and the visceral expression of suppressed voices.
Valenzuela’s photographic approach combines elements of both a museum archive and a performance stage. As he explains, “The idea is to subvert the ideology attached to the gallery or museum as a place of canonized beauty and information and replace it with a more egalitarian and sensitive space for the dissemination of popular knowledge and bodily wisdom.” Peripheral Gestures further include Muecas, a
series of white ceramic sculptures mounted on aluminum pipes and metal armatures. Created by casting Valenzuela’s own hands in contorted, ambiguous poses, these sculptures capture unrecognized gestures of human expression.
According to Valenzuela, these works serve as “motions of desire” and contribute to a “collective lexicon” that reflects the effort to communicate from positions of powerlessness. Additionally, the exhibition presents New Land, a series of landscape paintings developed during Valenzuela’s residency. These works examine historical themes like Manifest Destiny and the Homestead Acts, which drove westward expansion while embodying ideologies of white European-American supremacy. Valenzuela's landscapes, rendered by transferring printing toner onto raw canvas, reveal the strain of his labor-intensive process. This technique evokes the bureaucratic burdens endured by immigrants, creating a profound metaphor for resilience and resistance.