Nicolás Rodríguez’s Paisajes series carries out a subversive operation by intervening in the traditional domestic imagination. The choice of ceramic plates as a medium is not accidental; these objects refer to family heritage—“grandmother’s plates”—to “imported recipes” and to the old “promises of abundance” associated with the modern, civilising project. Rodríguez confronts these vestiges of an idealised past with the harsh reality of Argentina’s rural and social present.

Each plate, meticulously hand-drawn with graphite and cobalt oxide, condenses images of territorial and social margins. The delicacy of the artisanal gesture contrasts brutally with the harshness of the scenes depicted: deforestation in the north, indigenous land claims, precarious housing, fumigations, and repression in neighbourhoods.

The glazed surface, traditionally associated with lustre and neatness, is transformed into a political territory and archive where extractive and exclusionary policies leave their mark. By inserting these narratives of violence and dispossession into everyday domestic objects, the artist dismantles the separation between the public sphere (the territorial struggle) and the private sphere (food and home).

The series transforms everyday objects into devices of critical memory. The formal beauty of craftsmanship acts as a vehicle for conveying the ugliness of social and ecological injustice. The contrast between subtle technique and violent subject matter generates ethical and aesthetic friction that forces viewers to confront the origins of their well-being. Each plate becomes a sensitive map of the fractures that run through the contemporary landscape, demonstrating that the promised land of abundance was always built on violence and the silencing of territories.

Victor Lopez Zumelzu