DAGOBERTO RODRÍGUEZ AND THE CARIBBEAN AS A TERRITORY OF INSTABILITY

Submersus marks Dagoberto Rodríguez’s (Caibarién, Cuba, 1969) first solo exhibition at Madrid’s Casado Santapau gallery. Through a selection of paintings, sculptures, and installations, the artist proposes an immersion into the maritime imaginary of the Caribbean. From this perspective, the sea emerges as a space of transformation, memory, and displacement, in a reinterpretation that moves beyond the merely picturesque. Water becomes an active medium that distorts and reconfigures forms and narratives, reshaping the conditions through which they are perceived.

The exhibition invites viewers to engage with the tension between stability and instability, conceptual oppositions that have come to define much of Rodríguez’s recent practice. Forms emerge only to disappear again; surfaces metaphorically expand toward uncertainty; and structures function less as fixed configurations than as transitional states. What unfolds is a visual language grounded in processes of appearance, dissolution, and perpetual transformation.

Through a rigorous exploration of painterly possibilities, chromatic intensity, and three-dimensional form, the works construct a distinct visual universe in which the image is subjected to both the physical and perceptual dynamics of change. In this sense, Submersus can be understood as an immersive experience—an invitation to a sensory engagement with space. The installation of the works throughout the gallery, together with their contemplative character, envelops the viewer and draws them into a territory of shifting perceptions.

It is precisely here that the exhibition finds its central proposition: the construction of an imaginary shaped within an environment that challenges fixity and permanence, prompting reflection on what endures, what transforms, and what remains latent. Therefore, the exhibition foregrounds the coexistence of the visible and the submerged while revisiting one of Rodríguez’s longstanding concerns: the fragility of architectural forms and utopian landscapes, conceived as scenarios perpetually suspended between construction and collapse.

Dagoberto Rodríguez: Submersus is on view through 25 July 2026 at Casado Santapau, Piamonte 10, Madrid, Spain.