Dagoberto Rodríguez’s solo exhibition “Submersus” is now on view at Galería Casado Santapau, located at Piamonte 10, Madrid, Spain, until July 25, 2026.
Description: Casado Santapau Gallery presents Submersus, the new exhibition by artist Dagoberto Rodríguez, a project that unfolds as a sustained immersion into the material, symbolic, and temporal depths of the Caribbean marine imaginary. Through a collection of recent works—watercolors, paintings, and sculptures—Rodríguez not only represents the sea but also activates it as a device for thought, as a field of forces where history, memory, and perception converge.
Far from a landscape or descriptive approach, Submersus proposes an experience of decentering. The point of view dissolves, the surface ceases to be a boundary and becomes a threshold. To submerge here implies abandoning the stability of the visible in order to enter a realm of fluctuation, where light does not illuminate but disperses, where form is not fixed but emerges and recedes in continuous movement. Water is not the bottom, but the medium: a dense space that contains, distorts, and reconfigures everything it passes through.
In this new phase, the artist incorporates a renewed exploration of color and pictorial matter. The oil paintings stand out for their chromatic intensity and meticulous execution, which reinforces the almost sculptural dimension of their surfaces. The watercolors, for their part, offer a more intimate and fluid approach, while the sculptures expand their language into the three-dimensional, maintaining the conceptual coherence of the whole.
In this context, Rodríguez’s technical practice reaches an almost paradoxical dimension. His virtuosity—evident in his extreme control of watercolor, in the material construction of his paintings, and in the formal precision of his sculptures—is not oriented toward the affirmation of the image, but rather toward its instability. Transparencies overlap until they become opaque; the pictorial layers generate depths that negate any immediate interpretation; the three-dimensional forms seem to capture transitory states, as if they were frozen fragments of a perpetually mutating process.
[. . .] Thus, the Caribbean Sea presents itself as a critical extension of those utopian landscapes: a territory where the promises of order and control are eroded by the instability of the environment. The forms that emerge in the exhibition can be interpreted as architectures in transit, as constructions that have abandoned the logic of permanence to integrate into dynamics of flow, sedimentation, and drift. Utopia, far from disappearing, is reconfigured in a fluid, elusive state, where all projection is subject to contingency.
In Submersus, the Caribbean is presented as an expanded geography: not merely a physical place, but a fluid archive where narratives of displacement, violence, exchange, and survival settle. Beneath the apparent serenity of the water’s surface lie stories that are not always visible yet persist like subterranean currents. In this sense, the works function as points of contact between the visible and the submerged, between what is shown and what resists being fully represented.
The notion of immersion permeates the entire exhibition, not only as a theme, but also as a methodology. The viewer does not stand before the works but is progressively absorbed by them. The scale, composition, and spatial construction generate an immersive experience that appeals to both the body and the eye. Seeing becomes an act of navigation: an attentive drift in which every detail, every variation of light or texture, unlocks new layers of meaning. [. . .]
With this exhibition, Dagoberto Rodríguez deepens and shifts the lines of force in his artistic trajectory, articulating a continuity between his investigations into built space and this new exploration of the liquid as a critical field. The result is a proposal that not only expands his language but also redefines the ways in which the landscape—urban or marine—can be conceived, inhabited, and remembered. [. . .]
Dagoberto Rodríguez (Cuba, 1969) is an artist whose practice lies at the intersection of art, architecture, and critical spatial thinking. His career has unfolded between Europe and the Americas, consistently addressing the relationship between utopia, modernity, and the construction of the urban environment. Formed within the context of the Cuban artistic generation of the late 20th century, his work has explored the imaginaries of the contemporary city, social engineering, and planning models as devices of power and representation.
Throughout his career, Rodríguez has developed projects that investigate the tensions between the built and the projected, between the modernist promise and its material failure. His work has included installations, paintings, drawings, and spatial projects in which architecture is understood not only as a constructed form but also as a mental and political structure.
In recent years, his research has expanded this field into more fluid and organic territories, where the landscape—marine, urban, or hybrid—becomes a stage for the dissolution of spatial certainties. Submersus continues this line of work, shifting its focus to the fluid as a critical space for reflection on memory, history, and contemporary perception. [. . .]
For full description and more information, see https://casadosantapau.com/
Also see https://www.artealdia.com/Galleries/DAGOBERTO-RODRIGUEZ-AND-THE-CARIBBEAN-AS-A-TERRITORY-OF-INSTABILITY (review) and https://www.arteinformado.com/guia/f/dagoberto-rodriguez-sanchez-193838
Dagoberto Rodríguez’s solo exhibition “Submersus” is now on view at Galería Casado Santapau, located at Piamonte 10, Madrid, Spain, until July 25, 2026. Description: Casado Santapau Gallery presents Submersus, the new exhibition by artist Dagoberto Rodríguez, a project that unfolds as a sustained immersion into the material, symbolic, and temporal depths of the Caribbean marine
