Freddy Rodríguez found himself in front of a canvas, awestruck by the devastation wrought by the tsunami of 2011 in Japan.
He used an air compressor to paint and meshed colors that individually could have represented mud, bricks, limbs, wires, plastic, rubber, clouds, light. Together they merged into the chaos of life colliding with life. He ran waves of pain and motion through them, turning them into what he saw as a visual language of pain and loss.
The outpouring in his studio of Flushing, Queens, led to a series of paintings that grew to thirty-one. He simply called the series “Tsunami.”
Rodríguez is no stranger to the expression of loss through art.
The artist, born in the Dominican Republic in 1945 and based in New York City since 1963, was the creator of the Flight 587 Memorial commissioned by the city after the crash of a passenger airliner bound to Santo Domingo in November 2001. The accident killed 265 people, including 251 passengers, 9 crew members and 5 people on the ground. The memorial now stands in the Rockaway Park neighborhood of Queens, about a mile east from the crash site.
This is how I came to know him.