Liste 2025

Chris Sharp Gallery is pleased to present a solo booth of Mark A. Rodriguez at Liste.

For his booth, Rodriguez’s has a created a new selection of works which continue and elaborate upon his stamp series.

For this series, Rodriguez has created "frames" for the stamps, which exist somewhere between painting and sculpture. Fashioned out of sculptamold and then painted with layers of acrylic paint, the frames-cum-paintings playfully read like small, multicolored cumuluses, with uneven surfaces, as if they were organic forms or conglomerations of candy. Approximately twenty times the size of the stamp, the artworks all but eclipse the stamps, reducing them to details, and almost become the subject of the work.

This is but one of the many contradictions or paradoxes discreetly woven into the dense conceptual fabric of these pieces, making them hard to even begin to fathom. Postal stamps in and of themselves bring into play a dizzying host of associations: Americana (the Simpsons, the Liberty Bell, celebrated public figures, presidents, government programs); the singular and the multiple; the ready made; value; image production; collecting, in all of its forms from the most pedestrian (philately) to the most soi-disant rarefied (art). Indeed, every feint or apparent extension of discursive territory that these works claim seems to complicate if not cancel out the one preceding it. Take for example, value. The original use value of the stamp is canceled out by its symbolic transformation into a work of art, where its value is multiplied and elevated into an abstraction. And yet this elevation necessarily entails the negation of the stamp's philatelic value as a collectible, as the stamps are hinged within the artwork, traditionally conflating the stamp’s value as a result.

Their conceptual complexity aside, the objects themselves are weirdly beautiful; their formal attributes evoking whole histories of Los Angeles sculpture from Mike Kelley to Ken Price, while their formal conceptual underpinnings are indebted to On Kawara (seriality, dates, commemorations). The bright, nuanced and, at times, downright confectionary palettes of the artwork would seem to be inspired by the palettes in the stamps, but they do not always correspond, and yet this decision does not seem aleatory. Despite the formal playfulness of the work, no decision seems arbitrary here, even if the work isn’t always ready to yield up its mystery.