By Babacar Mbow

Congratulations Tony Rodríguez, excelent work. 

The thematic of the artist Tony Rodríguez finds pan-Caribbean linkages as in the work of Antonio Eligio Fernández (Tonel), Mundo Soñado at the Museo de Bellas Artes of Havana. In it, we see a world map composed as a puzzle of pieces of wood that have the shape of Cuba.

In Tony Rodríguez we see the usual perspective, the strength of drawing and color that each Cuban requires to look at his island through a mixture of cultures from somewhere else, finds itself inversed. His world becomes a projection of isolation, of piecing of the island. But, at the same time, the world created by the artist is recomposed in a complete and harmonious manner by the island, capable of expanding infinitely by “repetition” of itself.

Cuban writer Antonio Benítez-Rojo these in a concept of Repeating Island using Chaos theory with the claims that within the disorder represented by nature, there are repeating regularities. For Rojo then, as for the excellent artist Tony Rodríguez despite the Caribbean’s disorder of geography, language, and politics, a repeating order exists.

Babacar Mbow: Executive Director of the Florida Africana Studies Consortium and was Director of Museum of Contemporary Art Miami (MOCA).