Artist: Daniel Rios Rodriguez
Exhibition title: Southwestern Gothic
Venue: Feuilleton, Los Angeles, US
Date: July 18 – August 1, 2020
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Feuilleton, Los Angeles
Feuilleton is pleased to present a solo exhibition of the San Antonio-based artist Daniel Rios Rodriguez.
Daniel Rios Rodriguez is known for his modestly scaled, assemblage-like paintings of landscapes, still lifes and memento mori, which often include found elements as well as elaborate hand-made frames. In order to create his unique imagery, he draws on a wide variety of sources, which includes his Mexican-American heritage, as distilled through the prism of a Southwestern gothic peculiar to Rodriguez, European and American modernism, notably Picasso, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove and Forrest Bess, and pre-Colombian iconography, as well as folk art, and arts and crafts traditions. As such, the work touches upon a sense of the universal through a very specific and unapologetic regionalism. If there is a mystical component to Rodriguez’s work, it manifests through a certain pragmatism, as rooted in the everyday of observed reality and landscape of the American southwest.
For his exhibition at Feuilleton, the artist presents a new series of India ink drawings on paper and a single painting, all of which was created in the past few months. The gothic quality of the work can be seen in its dense, ornate imagery, which pictorially exists on the threshold of abstraction and figuration (landscape), occasional allusions to violence and personal symbolism. Motifs, which include leaves, bottles, eyes, snakes, flowers and a heart which could also be read as a cactus bud, are synthesized with references to Black Lives Matter and political protest. And yet, far from sinister, this body of work speaks to a sense of renewal, offering a sense of bright and refreshing optimism, in spite of everything.
Daniel Rios Rodriguez (b. 1978, Killeen, TX) lives and works in San Antonio, TX. A selection of recent solo exhibitions includes: (2020) Semper Virens, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York, NY (2019) Another Fire, Cooper Cole, Toronto, ON; Bruisers, Artpace, San Antonio, TX (2018) Bite the Tongue, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, Ireland; It was literally the wreck of jewels and the crash of gems…, with Kate Newby, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York, NY (2017) Cooper Cole, Toronto, ON; Controlled Burn, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York, NY (2016) Lulu, Mexico City, Mexico. A selection fo group exhibitions includes: (2020) The Botanical Mind: Art, Mysticism, and the Cosmic Tree, Camden Arts Centre, London, UK (forthcoming) (2019) Beach, River, Forest: Gracie DeVito, Daniel Rios-Rodriguez & Aaron Spangler, Sean Horton (presents), New York, NY; City Prince/sses, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2018) Artist in Residence Exhibition, Chinati Foundation, Marfa, TX; Seeing Believing Having Holding (organized by Dan Byers), i8 Gallery, Reykjavik, Iceland; Right Here, Right Now: San Antonio, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, TX (2017).
