LIDÓ RICO AND CONCEPTS IN DIALOGUE
CARMEN HUST | ARTICULATE #18 | JANUAR 2019
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The Spanish artist Lidó Rico (1968) generates his drive from the explicit cultural acknowledgement to have a personal expressive language characterized by using his own body as an extensive additive tool to his toolbox of creation. Art has, alike any other facet of culture, the need to generate and sustain knowledge with the purpose of creating a recognizable voice of its own. Every singer has a different voice from others, from which he or she is recognized. Every author possesses a style that differentiate him or her from the rest. And in the artworld it happens just the same; every artist is directly identified by the language they decode. In the case of Lidó Rico, his work consists of a compendium between materials, past, presence and body – concepts in dialogue.

Rico doesn’t conceptualize art as a simple posture but an attitude of life itself, that shall rise from a friction with reality. The assemblage of frictions possesses a brutal capability to compress instants, to capture these escaping moments of which no one is in control. The polyester that Rico uses in his work, possess similar qualities, in order for him to express himself. According to the artist, polyester is a material transparent like water – and water is life. When the material catalyzes it’s capable of generating parallel realities, which are framing the source of interest to Lidó Rico. To Rico, humanity is weak, and all weakness is refined. The human body is limited and incomprehensible, according to Rico, which is why he finds it necessary to catalyze these exact concepts and reframe the values of each person, strengthen them for them to last. 

“My skin only intents to function as a container of my emotions. My preferred media is not only conceivable by the use of a single media, as I’m interested in all sorts of materials that provoke and evoke emotions. I consider myself as a mediator between the chemical and the organic”, adds Rico.

In the elaboration of his works, Rico emphasizes the disambiguate relation of the work both being pre-thought and emerging on its own, as he often thinks of how a piece is going to look like and how it lacks resemblance to this exact thought in its final stages. Rico describes it as wanting to go to a certain place, because others have spoken well of it. Adopting the thought of it and not wanting to miss the sensation of it, you hurry to go there. 

But lacking the agitated fumbling through the journey, one possibly loses all the mysteries and unexpected surprises that could occur; and which are of much greater value, than the actual destination itself. To Rico, correctly managing that thin line is the most important thing, to learn how to walk through the most absolute chaos, without safety cords, but always with a specific fix, makes the results gain in power. 

“I am very clear that if the emotion is orthopedic, the results will be the same, however, if you play clean with yourself, the fruit can have a really disturbing power.
I think that when you have a Germanic discipline with work, the ideas arrive alone, the question is to assess the weight of each one to decide which path to take.” 

Choosing the themes of his pieces, Rico works with obsessions, functioning like a disturbing thought that forces him to be materialized, as his brain assumes a certain idea, no matter how absurd it may seem, as something biological, expel it from his head and body to survive. Often, he gets the impression that it’s not him who chooses the issues but on the contrary, they are the ones who decide, showing him that their power is far beyond his own decisions.

To Rico there’re no formulas in generating a great composition, as such needs to respond to and mirror the needs of the presence, reality and time. History of art carries many burdens, the past is a fundamental layer without any doubt, but to Rico, the issues that hit our present and its ability to generate critical discourses are much more important. 

According to Rico, it could be a good beginning to recognize our own ignorance and mediocrity, learning to manage many of our miseries, have more naturalness in front of life, more awareness of the miracle that our existence supposes, let us flow without complexes and without the need for these absurd mortgages accounting with others, where the only valid attitude is the commitment, to squeeze and improve daily results.
            “I live from a daily source of reality and learning, I stay with an artist that I have lived with every day for many years, in her silence, she teaches you so many things that you would not give credit if you were to perceive them, maybe you recall her name, she’s called nature.”

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This article about LIDÓ RICO takes part of the release of ARTICULATE #18. Check out the full release below