Bio

José Rodríguez is an artist working across sculpture and installation, with a background in painting, carving, and modeling. He studied Industrial Design in 2012 at the Institute of Design of Caracas and later pursued Fine Art studies at London Metropolitan University.

His practice is rooted in hands-on making and material exploration, with a strong interest in recycled materials and environmental responsibility.

Influenced by the physical experience of the city—through graffiti, urban movement, and kinetic principles—Rodríguez is drawn to public space as a site of interaction and transformation.

He is particularly interested in creating sculpture and murals that engage directly with their surroundings, emphasizing process, balance, and material presence.

Statement

My artistic practice is rooted in the vibrant, dynamic world of street art and its relationship with the urban environment. Over the past four years, my work has been shaped by sustained engagement with street-based practices through site-specific research, direct interaction with artists, and immersion in the environments where this practice exists. Graffiti has the power to transform public space through creativity, individuality, and collective expression. At the same time, I am deeply aware of its environmental impact—particularly the waste generated through spray cans, caps, stencils, adhesives, rollers, and the continuous accumulation of paint on city walls.

Rather than viewing these materials as disposable remnants, I treat them as resources. My work focuses on the material traces left behind by street art—its vestiges—and explores how they can be repurposed, recontextualized, and elevated through sustainable artistic processes. Central to this approach is graffite, a material formed by the accumulation of paint on public walls, which I treat as a sculptural resource. Shaped by countless anonymous gestures, this material embodies a form of unconscious collaboration; removed from its original context and reassembled, it challenges traditional notions of authorship, ownership, and individual expression within graffiti culture. Functioning simultaneously as archive and object, it carries the physical memory of collective action and reveals how meaning shifts when shared surfaces are reorganized into new forms.

As my practice evolved, it expanded beyond object-making into installations and sculptural works that allowed me to address risk, absence, and continuity within street art culture. Through projects such as Memorial and Vestiges, I explored how graffiti’s material aftermath and the infrastructures surrounding it could be relocated into new contexts, where danger, loss, and persistence become perceptible without spectacle. A recurring sculptural form—flowers assembled from dismantled spray cans—emerged as a quiet hinge between these works, functioning simultaneously as tribute and continuation. Through processes of craft, restraint, and repetition, I have sought to slow down graffiti’s immediacy, transforming its remnants into forms that carry memory, labor, and collective presence beyond the moment of action.

More recently, my practice has begun to engage with questions of observation and perception within the urban environment through the development of a UFO-like sculptural form installed directly in public space. Conceived as a material witness, the UFO proposes a way of seeing the city not through imagery or narrative, but through accumulation and surface. This perspective has begun to inform the development of mural works that translate this way of seeing into painting: murals that do not depict the city, but resemble it, echoing the layered textures, erosion, and sedimentation of accumulated paint. In this way, the work shifts attention from representation toward material presence and continuous transformation.