Label Text"All time merges in the self. That is why I have chosen as a point of departure for the exploration of the relationship between the inner and outside world, the autobiographical. The self-portrait has become for me the most immediate way to confront reality."
- Ángel Rodríguez-Díaz
A native of Puerto Rico, Rodríguez-Díaz has held a longtime interest in issues of identity. When he moved to New York City in 1978, he experienced life for the first time as a minority. Upon relocating to San Antonio in 1994, his concept of being "the other" shifted once again. As a Puerto-Rican living within a city whose heritage and populace are predominantly Mexican, he now saw himself as a minority within the Latino community.
In his paintings of the past several years, Rodríguez-Díaz has used a number of metaphoric devices, such as masks, mirrors, or demonstrative gazes and hand gestures, to question his place in the universe. In this self-portrait, painted shortly before his move to San Antonio, the artist creates an artificial mask with his hands, and peers through his fingers with a questioning expression and furrowed brow. He shows himself only from the shoulders up, in front of a tunnel of golden light, and immersed within a field of suspended disks. This composition suggests that Rodríguez-Díaz, like all human beings, is connected to the larger scheme of the space-time continuum, bits and pieces of which are known to us through the scientific study of atoms and molecules, the solar system, and other elements of the cosmos.
(David Rubin, Label Text 2007)
This resource has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the Human Endeavor.
