Giacomo Santiago Rogado: Observing Self

In his new exhibition Observing Self Rogado takes this work as his point of departure. He presents three canvases with intense underwater figures, each complemented by a symmetrical, gold-colored symbol that he placed in the middle of the picture. It consists of several intersecting circles and evokes associations with spiritual metaphors like a dharma wheel or a lotus flower, sacred art, but also the iris or the diaphragm of a camera that controls the light passing through the aperture. The beholder observes while at the same time becoming an observer. As the color figures and the circles of the symbol intersect, art and the bolder interpenetrate one another. It is an ideal harmonic state that Rogado places his audience in. As the artist explains, the color gold has always been used to idealize. Together with Intuition (Vortex), Rogado also presents Introspection, a series of small-format canvases that take up conceptually from color field painting. In each, the artist has applied a color he himself developed, crimson, Naples yellow, sap green, madder, and others. With geometric brushstrokes painted toward the middle of the painting, he has given these works a pull that can be read as a commentary on the impact of abstract art. Rogado understands them as an analogy to what various spiritual and psychotherapeutic schools describe as the observing self, which he has made the subject of his exhibition.