Rigoberto Rosales Jalil Oficial Page, Miami, FL (2026)

03/21/2024

La pesadilla de Jonás. San Mateo, 12, 40: “Porque, como estuvo Jonás en el vientre del cetáceo tres días y tres noches, así estará el Hijo del hombre tres días y tres noches en el corazón de la tierra”.
Ink and Cuban coffee on wood. 2024. Miami, Florida. USA

Scenario of Simultaneous Fugues:
The Art of Rigoberto Rosales Jalil

by

Ricardo Pau-Llosa

The mixed media works of Rigoberto Rosales Jalil (b. 1976, Camaguey, Cuba, living in US since 2011) are imbued with a distinctively theatrical sensibility which revels in how ideas and psychic states interact. While, typically, we associate ideas with the collective dimension of identity and psychic states with the individual dimension, they are always co-present and overlap in consciousness, like circles in a Venn Diagram. The resulting mandorla—where archetype, ideas, passions, fears, the dream state, memory, and creativity converge—serves as a guiding principle for understanding the theatrical conceptions of space and image in Rosales Jalil’s works. In the modern sensibility, there is no better space in which to reflect upon the interaction of collective and individual dimensions of identity than the stage—conceptually, the mandorla of our times. It is on this stage-mandorla that the temporal, fleeting nature of all ideas and things, central to our epochal worldview, reveals its simultaneity in consciousness. We are fugue’s natives, denizens of tidal flux, knowing the urban reef and its culture of trade and archive is but a frail if necessary backdrop to rumors of character, plot, resolution, and insight.
Rosales Jalil’s art reworks the venerable traditions it hails from. One of these is the retablo, a small-scale religious artpiece which consists of painted and/or sculpted Christian icons, often in the form of portable, tabletop shrines and very popular in the popular art traditions of Spain, Portugal, and Latin America. In baroque churches of these regions, multiple retablos in the form of niche shrines are permanent elements in the reredos of altars. Folk artists of Peru and Mexico sometimes introduce secular, everyday scenes in retablos, as well as scenes from popular lore. The folk arts of Latin America have had a great impact on Rosales Jalil’s work, especially on the raw immediacy of his cut forms, and on his knack for intimating narratives among the figures and objects that inhabit his darkly familiar urban scenarios. Other traditions which have nurtured Rosales Jalil’s imagination include puppet scenarios, Surrealist art and objects, and dioramas. The oneiric boxed assemblages of Joseph Cornell are recalled, as well as film noir’s poetics (and erotics) of nihilism. We cannot ignore that Rosales Jalil is also an heir to Latin American figurative expressionist painting, which has never ceased developing through the work of Mauricio Lasansky, Antonia Eiriz, Julio Rosado del Valle, José Luís Cuevas, Jorge de la Vega, Luís Felipe Noé, Arnaldo Roche Rabell, among others. Altogether, these traditions point to another vital simultaneity in Rosales Jalil’s imagination—that of media and support which, as in the case of the prismatic immediacy of references and dramatization, reveal a confluence of drawing, painting, sculpture, and the dramaturgy of theater and cinema.
The baroque fugue is the structural muse of Rosales Jalil’s aesthetics. Its power is felt in the layering of images that involve perception, the visual embodying that of the other senses. Often, Rosales Jalil’s characters are seen peering through telescopes, not at stars but at the ground or their surroundings. The telescope captures, albeit hyperbolically, the dynamics of what philosopher Edmund Husserl calls “eidetic” (vivid, suppositon-free) grasping or “intending”of the physical world we share (lebenswelt or “life-world”). Rosales Jalil invites viewers to enter his scenarios, telescoping their subjective centers into the scene they are ‘having’ (as in a dream) rather than ‘seeing.’ The walls and floors function as bracketting devices, pointedly excluding the familiar from this world of simultaneous fugues. The buildings in the background grid the scene with windows and contours, intimating the urban lore of impersonal enclosures and, conversely, the infinite through the synecdoche of pattern. A similar ambiguity is found in the works of Joaquín Torres-García with their fusion of the Constructivist grid and symbols—the origins of language.
In Rosales-Jalil’s works, viewers encounter individuals and clusters, sometimes both. Automobiles and carts, devoid of their transportational duties, function as stages-within-the stage, an elevation where figures have gathered. The lone wielder of strangely aimed telescopes at times dons a careless pair of angelic wings, masks for the freighted soul rather than indicators of transcendence. The wings also reference the Medieval origins of the mandorla in Christian art. The intersection of the two circles of identity—divine and human—in the ocular almond shape served as the spatial frame within which to represent the Messiah, often accompanied by Evangelists or angels at the cardinals. But in the works of Rosales Jalil, the scene betokens no theology. We are taking a breather in the labyrinth, a moment to project the inner maze onto the mire of solitary confinement in the tumult of a broken Babel. The fugues of soul and soullessness converge, the inner forge and the outer furnace. As in a recent work, the figure of Jonah pursued by the fury of nightmare is locked into a dialogue on the nature of refuge, which, as he dreads, is a soliloquy for his ears only. Nothing like fleeing into what lives to feel truly lost.
In music, fugues overlap in exquisite pursuit of order within the dissolutions of time. In the works of Rosales Jalil, fugues are simultaneous yet visibly audible. The circles do not partially overlap but overlay each other to sharpen our view of each syntax of anecdote and reflection, like aligned lenses turning to deny distance as they facet details to their essential light. Rosales Jalil is a true master whose brilliance, originality, and skill cannot help but become obvious to all. The sooner this happens, the better for this age.