Devon Rodriguez’s bedroom in his grandmother’s South Bronx apartment looks like any 23-year-old’s space might: a flat-screen television hangs on the wall, a checkered duvet cover rests atop a lofted bed and black drapes dangle in the window, ready to hide the sunlight. But set up in the corner are the wooden easel and erstwhile nightstand, now a painter’s table, that Rodriguez uses to make the hyper-realist portraits of New Yorkers for which he is becoming recognized. A recent self-portrait (he has done one every year since 2010) called “Reflection” rests against the baseboard and shows the artist in a Metallica T-shirt, a tattooed arm by his side, the opposite hand holding a paintbrush. Next to it is “Jonathan” (2018), which depicts his cousin seated in a chair, his Keith Haring T-shirt in full view.
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On Friday, Rodriguez will travel to Washington, D.C., to attend the opening of the exhibition “American Portraiture Today” at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery and learn the winner of the museum’s Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. He is a finalist for the esteemed prize, and his submission will be on display in the show. The Baltimore-based painter Amy Sherald won first prize in 2016 and was later selected by Michelle Obama to paint her now-viral grisaille portrait. “I applied for that one, but I didn’t even get in,” Rodriguez says of the last edition of the contest, which is held every three years. “I’m excited, and I think I’m the youngest one in it right now.” This year’s finalists include the celebrated Puerto Rican photographer Adal Maldonado, known for his involvement in the Nuyorican movement, and Lava Thomas, who has rendered civil rights activists in graphite and conté pencil. Regardless of the competition’s results, Rodriguez says, “I’m going to be doing portraiture forever.”
Rodriguez’s art career started, by osmosis, at the age of 8. “All my friends that were artists would do graffiti in the Bronx,” he says. “I was like, ‘All right, I’m going to.’ I didn’t even decide. Doing graffiti was just natural.” When it was time to apply to high school in 2010, he hoped to attend the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan and was required to submit a portrait for the portfolio. He submitted a peach-toned drawing of a young boy with gleaming eyes, his dark hair neatly lined up. “It was terrible,” he admits. He didn’t get accepted that year, instead attending his local high school, Samuel Gompers (which closed in 2012). There, an art teacher helped him with his portfolio, and he finally got into his dream institution, leaving the South Bronx for Midtown.
At the High School of Art and Design (whose alumni include the fashion designer Marc Jacobs, the photographer Lorna Simpson and the rapper John David Jackson, a.k.a. Fabolous), Rodriguez was blown away by a teacher he saw painting a student from life. “I would stalk him after school, during class, before school and email him, ‘How do you do this? How do you do that?’” Rodriguez says. He was particularly fascinated by the intimacy of portraiture. Ever since he graduated from high school, he has been painting eight hours a day, five days a week. He rarely does anything else. (“I only have, like, five friends,” he says, laughing.) He has exhibited his work as part of several group shows, including one at La MaMa’s La Galleria in the East Village and another at Abend Gallery in Denver, Colo., and subsists on commissions and private sales.
Rodriguez’s most distinguished work, thus far, is his “Subway Series,” somber photo-realist paintings of New York’s subway passengers, which have been featured in The New York Times and The New Yorker. He oftentimes covertly snaps pictures on his iPhone and uses the unknowing models as subjects. “I don’t have to hire anyone. I just get on the subway and there are paintings everywhere,” he says. “There’s an unlimited subject matter.” His “Bronx Bound 6 Train” (2019) shows a child leaning against his matriarch, with the brightness of the orange, blue and pink color palette set in marked contrast to the end-of-day weariness the figures evoke. “Girl in a Brown Jacket” (2018) presents a woman wearing a structured coat, her hands neatly folded in her lap over beige gloves, legs crossed tightly; behind her, an advertisement for a 7-Eleven breakfast sandwich. Yet another, “Parkslopians” (2017), depicts a couple, one with sunglasses and a hat, reading The New Yorker. With these works, Rodriguez offers a kind of 21st-century directory of racial and economic idiosyncrasies, human life braced by screens, buttressed by brand signifiers. His characters provide nostalgia for a New York that never was, through the frictionless commingling of classes — a city beloved but never tragic.
Despite all the urban liveliness that Rodriguez captures, he did not submit something from his “Subway Series” to the Outwin like he had wanted to do. Instead, because it was the only piece he had on hand, he sent a painting of his mentor and friend, the sculptor John Ahearn, whose studio is a 10-minute walk away from Rodriguez’s. (The two met when Rodriguez had a small show at BronxArtSpace and were instant kin.) “John Ahearn” (2017) is a sober portrait of the 67-year-old artist, severe in a plaster-splattered shirt, captured by a young artist who, despite his age, knows what life gives and takes away.
Three years ago, Ahearn submitted “The Rodriguez Twins” (2014) — a pair of plaster busts of Rodriguez — to the Outwin. There’s certainly a story here about intergenerational collaboration and creative sustenance in the Bronx, but it is also simpler than that. “We’re still good friends,” Rodriguez says of Ahearn. “We’re doing another sculpture that shows my tattoo sleeve. We just worked on it yesterday.”
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