Daniel Rios Rodriguez Solo Show

Known for his small, highly detailed and thickly impastoed approach to picture making, Daniel Rios Rodriguez is San Antonio-based painter who depicts memento mori, still lives, landscapes and autobiographical scenes. Often including found elements, such as rocks, shells and feathers, which he incorporates into his densely textured surfaces, he builds frames for his paintings with materials such as wood and rope, which become part of the work itself. His intimately-scaled and unconventional paintings have been compared to the collages of Picasso, Paul Klee, Merlin James, the early work of Jean Dubuffet, and perhaps most significantly, the Texas-born painter and eccentric Forrest Bess, while nevertheless being notoriously unplaceable.

For his solo exhibition at Lulu, the artist will present a new suite of his singular and idiosyncratic paintings. Strongly representative of his unique mode of making, the new works demonstrate virtuosic color combinations while continuing to integrate mundane and unexpected materials, like burned match sticks, wheat, rocks, charred wood chips, so on and so forth. As such, by weaving together the aesthetic of, say, the thrift store and arts and crafts with a history of art that includes everything from Impressionism to the assemblage techniques of the ‘50s as well as the above mentioned painters, these works directly speak to the artist’s ongoing adherence to the minor and the marginal as a serious and committed position in contemporary art.