Daniel Rios Rodriguez

The works of Daniel Ríos Rodriguez (Killeen, US, 1978) are often small-scale, intricate assemblages in which paint and objects are combined to create oneiric, semi-figurative compositions. With great craftsmanship, Rodriguez experiments not only with the use of ordinary materials (rope, stone, nails, and so on) on the pictorial surface, but quite often creates panels in irregular shapes that seem to emphasize the physicality of the work. There is something almost totemic about these works in that they seem pregnant with some mysterious kind of symbology, and yet they are devoid of any narrative or religious content. Ríos Rodriguez’s pictorial vocabulary seems to draw on a multitude of forms that have been historically overlooked by mainstream art historical discourses. His is a vocabulary of the ‘minor’: folk, outsider, a personal cosmogony that resists interpretation whilst expanding painting into a very original unknown territory.