In the Heart of Seville: Dagoberto Rodríguez Unveils “Lengua Trópica” at Fundación Cajasol
Seville has become the stage for a singular and long-awaited event in the landscape of contemporary Cuban art. On April 28, 2026, Fundación Cajasol inaugurated Lengua Trópica, the first solo exhibition in Andalusia by the internationally acclaimed artist Dagoberto Rodríguez. Occupying the prestigious Sala Velázquez y Murillo, this ambitious presentation—curated by Reyes Abad Flores and co-produced with VF Art Projects—brings together more than forty works that trace a profound dialogue between Rodríguez’s formative years as co-founder of the legendary collective Los Carpinteros and his mature solo practice of the past decade. Open until May 31, the exhibition offers visitors an immersive journey through sculpture, installation, video, painting, and works on paper, all unified by a sharp, poetic intelligence that transforms the everyday into potent vehicles of social and political reflection.
Born in Caibarién, Cuba, in 1969, Dagoberto Rodríguez has, for more than three decades, cultivated one of the most distinctive and incisive voices in Latin American art. After co-founding Los Carpinteros in the early 1990s alongside Marco Castillo, he helped redefine the possibilities of sculpture and installation through a singular fusion of architectural thinking, design sensibility, and irreverent humor. Since the collective’s dissolution, Rodríguez has continued to develop an independent language that is at once deeply personal and expansively political, moving between Havana and Madrid while maintaining a nomadic curiosity about how objects, spaces, and signs carry the weight of history and ideology. His works reside in the world’s most significant collections—the Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, Guggenheim, and Reina Sofía among them—yet his practice has never lost the tactile immediacy and conceptual rigor that first brought him to international attention.
Lengua Trópica takes its title from the fertile interplay between “lengua” (tongue/language) and the tropical condition of Cuban—and by extension Caribbean—identity. The exhibition proposes that objects themselves speak in a hybrid, twisting tongue: a tropical language of tropes, metaphors, and sly displacements that reveals the hidden architectures of power. Through humor and irony, Rodríguez examines patriotic symbolism, surveillance, cultural memory, and the contradictions of our technological age. Everyday items are stripped of their innocence and recast as sharp commentaries on propaganda, identity, and the fragile contracts that bind societies. The show’s conceptual core—the fluid relationship between language and object—manifests across media, inviting viewers to read the world as a living text where meaning is constantly negotiated, subverted, and reborn.
A highlight of the presentation is the first European showing of the monumental installation Constrictora (2015), a sixteen-meter serpentine form fabricated from sheets of Brazilian electoral campaign posters. Coiling through the gallery like a mythic reptile, the work embodies the seductive yet constricting nature of political rhetoric—a body of propaganda that devours its own promises. This historic piece from the Los Carpinteros era resonates powerfully with Rodríguez’s more recent explorations of technology, conflict, and the manipulation of collective imaginaries, creating a through-line that illuminates both continuity and evolution in his thinking. The exhibition thus becomes not merely a survey but a living argument: that the artist’s voice, whether collaborative or solitary, has always spoken in the same restless, critical, and deeply human tongue.
For the DF Collection and all who follow the vital currents of Cuban and Latin American art, Lengua Trópica represents a moment of genuine significance. In the halls named for Velázquez and Murillo—masters who themselves transformed the visible world through light, gesture, and symbolic density—Dagoberto Rodríguez extends an ancient Spanish-Cuban conversation into the present. His is a practice that refuses easy binaries between beauty and critique, between the personal and the political, between tradition and rupture. Instead, it offers a tropical language that is lush, ironic, and urgently alive: a language capable of naming the forces that shape our shared reality while imagining, with wit and rigor, how those forces might yet be reconfigured.
The exhibition is open to the public with free entry (subject to capacity) from Monday to Saturday, 11:00–14:00 and 18:00–21:00, at Fundación Cajasol, Plaza de San Francisco, 1, Seville. It remains on view through May 31, 2026. For those who cannot travel to Seville, the show stands as a compelling reminder that the most powerful art continues to speak in tongues that are at once local and universal, rooted and nomadic, critical and celebratory—precisely the language Dagoberto Rodríguez has spent a lifetime perfecting.
