Francisco Rodríguez | Private Nightmares

"What I paint is something that no longer exists," Francisco Rodríguez says. "Like how the stars we're looking at are already dead—their light reaches us after they've turned to dust." He describes his practice simply: "I'm painting dust—memories of places that no longer exist." Rodríguez's paintings trace interior feeling through liminal spaces and sensory impressions that resist language: the smell of an orange, adolescent yearning, the trace of a place that survives only in memory. For him, painting reconnects these lineages not as fixed archives but as living impressions, continuously reshaped over time. His reference points stretch from Japanese Edo-period printmaking to Chinese horizontal landscape painting and Flemish Renaissance traditions. These visual inheritances inform his flattened compositions and muted palette, which evoke pastoral or dreamlike atmospheres: layers of cool-toned blue and cream punctuated by bursts of primary red and orange. Contemporary figures appear throughout in various states of rest and movement, drifting through domestic scenes less as protagonists than as embodiments of the subconscious. Rodríguez's solo exhibition at Baert Gallery, Private Nightmares, extends these themes while introducing a darker emotional register shaped by present-day anxieties. Across this new body of work, figures turn to analog devices as if reaching for a portal of escape from the relentlessness of contemporary media cycles. The paintings grapple with the paradox that the tools meant to connect us often leave us feeling more isolated and divided than ever. Rodríguez articulates this ambivalence through suspended moments between childhood and adulthood, interiority and public life, dependence and autonomy. He's drawn to adolescence for its openness and emotional volatility, qualities that mirror the broader uncertainty of contemporary life. His paintings allow vulnerability and ambiguity to remain translucent.