Controlled Burn

April 21 - May 21, 2017

Daniel Rios Rodriguez

Press Release

Nicelle Beauchene Gallery is thrilled to announce Controlled Burn, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with San Antonio-based artist Daniel Rios Rodriguez.

Rodriguez’s modest scale canvases reconfigure abstraction as symbolic, esoteric explorations that consider landscape, still life painting and vanitas iconography as themes and associations within his practice. Combining the formal austerity of Constructivism with the mystical elements of Surrealism, the artist’s intimate constructions gesture toward something beyond a physical reality. Through their abstruse narratives, the works express reverence for other art forms such as theater, literature, and film.

Incorporating and encoding cast off or discarded materials found on daily walks taken in and around the San Antonio River Valley — feathers, rope, wood, shells, river rocks— into his miniature tableaux, Ro- driguez’s semi-abstract compositions become autobiographical investigations where memory and nostalgia become a condition of his practice. Loaded with symbolic meaning and emotional content, these subversive assemblages echo and reflect the functionality of talismans or amulets.

The title of the exhibition, Controlled Burn, refers to Rodriguez’s variety of formal experiments — burning, cutting, etching— that test both the surface and the structure of his works. The physicality of his process can be seen in the roughly hewn artist-made frames as well as the careful application of feathers and other delicate objects. Contextually elusive and self-aware, Rodriguez’s canvases defy traditional painting practices, evolving into a territory all its own.

Daniel Rios Rodriguez (Born in Killeen, TX, 1978) received his MFA from Yale in 2007. He lives and works in San Antonio. Recent solo exhibitions include Lulu, Mexico City; Western Exhibitions, Chicago; White Columns, New York.; McNay Art Museum, San Antonio. Recent group exhibitions include Galeria Fortes D’aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo, Brazil, Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles, Martos Gallery, New York; Wilkinson Gallery, London; Roberts & Tilton Gallery, Los Angeles. Additionally, Rodriguez has an upcoming solo project with Cooper Cole, Toronto (Summer 2017). The artist is a 2013 recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award.