Elio Rodriguez: El Sabor del Trópico

Elio Rodriguez: El Sabor del Trópico
Featured Online
Dec 23 – Feb 23, 2026

Location
532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel
Hammerstrasse 121
Basel, CH 4057
Wed–Fri: 13:30 – 18:00
Sat: 11:00 – 16:00 Artist
Elio Rodriguez

El Sabor del Trópico brings together a selection of recent and emblematic works by Elio Rodríguez that expand his long-standing engagement with the visual language of the Caribbean poster, popular culture, and cinematic advertising. Drawing from mid-20th-century graphic traditions, Rodríguez adopts parody, exaggeration, and visual seduction as critical tools—using color, humor, and spectacle to question how tropical identity, desire, masculinity, and power are constructed and consumed.

At first glance, these works appear festive and exuberant. Yet beneath their vivid surfaces lies a pointed reflection on stereotype and performance. Rodríguez’s recurring alter ego, El Macho, operates as both protagonist and critique: a self-aware figure who embodies and destabilizes inherited images of virility, exoticism, and cultural fantasy. What seems celebratory is often deliberately excessive, revealing the fragile line between pleasure and projection.

Rather than presenting nostalgic pastiche, Rodríguez reimagines the poster as a contemporary site of inquiry—where art and advertising collide, and where the image oscillates between object of desire and object of reflection. El Sabor del Trópico invites the viewer to look beyond the party, to consider what remains once the spectacle fades, and to recognize how these images mirror collective expectations as much as they parody them.
LA MONUMENTAL

2025
Acrylic on canvas
150 x 85 cm
GONE AGAIN

2025

Acrylic on canvas

150 x 85 cm
ARRANCAME LA VIDA

2025

Acrylic on canvas

150 x 85 cm
Inquire about works by Elio Rodriguez

Get in Touch

Danny%20Rolph%20%7C%20Le%20Stagioni
FUERZA LATINA

2025

Acrylic on silkscreen

150 × 85 cm

Edition of 10

This large-format work asserts presence through scale and graphic intensity. Fuerza Latina channels the visual authority of propaganda and popular advertising while interrogating the simplified narratives they promote. Strength, identity, and pride are presented not as fixed truths but as images shaped by repetition and spectacle.
EL FIESTON

2025

Acrylic on silkscreen

150 × 85 cm

Edition of 10

El Fiestón captures the party as both celebration and concealment. Beneath its energetic surface lies a critical question central to Rodríguez’s practice: how long can festivity distract from deeper social and cultural realities? The work embodies the artist’s recurring tension between joy and disquiet, humor and exposure.
TROPICALÍSIMA

2025

Acrylic on silkscreen,

80 × 100 cm

Edition of 10

Tropicalísima amplifies the visual codes of paradise to the point of excess. Fruits, bodies, and ornamental forms merge into a hyper-saturated composition that celebrates abundance while subtly critiquing it. The work embraces the seductive promise of the tropics, yet its exaggerated theatricality exposes the artificial nature of that promise—where pleasure is staged, exported, and endlessly repeated.
El Sabor del Trópico

2025

Acrylic on silkscreen

80 × 100 cm

Edition of 10

More than a reference to taste, El Sabor del Trópico speaks to cultural consumption. Rodríguez uses food, color, and bodily suggestion to explore how identity is packaged and made palatable for external audiences. The work plays with familiarity, drawing viewers in through warmth and pleasure before revealing its critical undertone.
El Poder del Caribe

2025

Acrylic on silkscreen

80 × 100 cm

Edition of 10

Here, Rodríguez confronts the notion of “power” as both cultural force and constructed image. The Caribbean is presented not as a passive fantasy but as an active, volatile presence—charged with history, resilience, and contradiction. The work reframes strength beyond cliché, balancing humor and confrontation within a highly graphic, emblematic composition.
La Tentación

2025

Acrylic on silkscreen

80 × 100 cm

Edition of 10

La Tentación positions desire as both subject and strategy. Drawing from cinematic poster traditions, Rodríguez constructs a scene that is intentionally alluring, inviting the viewer into a familiar narrative of seduction. Yet the work’s heightened symbolism and stylization reveal temptation itself as a performative device—carefully staged, endlessly replayed.
La Mulata

2025

Acrylic on silkscreen

80 × 100 cm

Edition of 10

In La Mulata, Rodríguez engages directly with one of the most persistent figures in Caribbean visual culture. The image oscillates between celebration and stereotype, questioning how the mixed-race female body has been historically aestheticized, marketed, and mythologized. By embracing exaggeration, the work exposes the mechanics of fetishization embedded in popular imagery.
LA MONUMENTAL

2025

Silkscreen on paper

100 x 70 cm

Edition of 10
About

Elio Rodriguez

Elio Rodriguez was born in 1966, and lives and works in Spain. His practice is engaged with the system of judgments about a person, a culture or phenomenon. Tapping the prism of Caribbean popular culture, its underlying humor and clichés formed about the culture, he builds witty and sensual works that seemingly incarnate that reality, and subtly and continuously question it. The ambivalence of genres is key to understanding the essence of his work. Rodriguez conceives a game of illusions with the viewer using the language of form and surface -- and ultimately reveals traces of doubt in the identity of a concept or an image. His practice encompasses painting, installations, sculptures, prints, ceramics, and soft sculpture interacting with chosen objects, his style referring to marks of Caribbean popular craftwork.

In 1994, he completed his arts studies at Havana’s Higher Institute of Art (ISA). He has been awarded Art Residencies at Hutchins Institute, Harvard University, at Mattress Factory Art Museum, Pittsburg, and given lectures at Harvard University, NYU, and Swarthmore College. His artwork has been displayed in several solo and group shows around the world. He is in public collections such as National Arts Museum, Cuba; Jersey City State University; Foundation AMBA, Brazil; Hainaut City Hall, Belgium; Peggy Crafitz Collection; Center For Cuban Studies, New York; Von Christierson Collection, London; Shelley & Donald Rubin Collection, New York; W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, Harvard University.
Further information & enquiries:

For a checklist, pricing information, or additional images, please contact:

info@532gallery.com