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0 Freddy Rodríguez, a New York–based painter whose works acted as a means of processing issues related to Latinx identity, died on Monday at 77. News of Rodríguez’s death was posted to the artist’s Instagram, which said that he had been battling ALS.
Rodríguez’s works spanned formalist abstraction and less easily classifiable forms of painting that enlisted found materials. Whether explicitly or not, these works dealt with racial inequities that he and other artists of color have faced for centuries.
Born in 1945 in Santiago de los Treinta Caballeros, Dominican Republic, Rodríguez was the grand-nephew of Yoryi Morel, a key figure associated with the development of modernism in the country. During his childhood, Rodríguez lived under the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, whose regime was responsible for the deaths of thousands, including a number of Haitians, whom the Dominican military violently targeted because he considered them ethnically inferior. The Trujillo regime came to an end in 1961, but even under his successor, Joaquín Balaguer, there was the constant threat of violence, so Rodríguez fled to the U.S.
Once he came to New York, Rodríguez attended the Fashion Institute of Technology and the New School for Social Research. He witnessed the shift from Abstract Expressionism to more conceptual modes of painting. Some of his earliest paintings, from the ’70s, were done in response to a mantra often put forward by the artist Frank Stella: “What you see is what you get.”
Rodríguez wanted to take his paintings one step further than Stella’s. “The challenge for me is: behind what you see, there is something else,” Rodríguez once told writer Richard Klin.
