Semper Virens

Press Release

Nicelle Beauchene Gallery is pleased to present Semper Virens, the gallery’s second solo exhibition with San Antonio-based artist Daniel Rios Rodriguez.

In his latest body of work, Rodriguez’s intimate assemblage paintings incorporate the iconography of life cycles: the sun, the moon, the spiral, the snake. The artist layers impastoed oil paint, river rocks, wire, wood, and rope to build up each surface, creating topographical pictorial fields. In many works, bold colors, patterns, and abstracted organic forms bleed off the surface onto the handmade frames, unique appendages of wood, rope, and molded concrete.

Rodriguez’s paintings employ techniques of abstraction to mine the autobiographical. While narratively ambiguous, each work attains a talismanic quality made evident by the artist’s physical hand and its essential object-ness. Continuing to incorporate found materials in each painting, the artist packs his works with the color and detritus of life.

Semper Virens—Latin for “always flourishing”—outlines a guiding philosophy for Rodriguez as an artist and a father witnessing the world. Moving organically from recent preoccupations with the symbolism of snakes and the sun, Rodriguez has crystalized these forms in the spiral, a central motif throughout the exhibition. As emblems of regeneration and regrowth, of new life borne out of devastation, spirals serve as elemental maps for developing a way forward under dire circumstances.

Daniel Rios Rodriguez (b. 1978, Killeen, Texas) received his MFA from Yale in 2007 and was a 2013 recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. Rodriguez has had solo exhibitions at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York, NY; Cooper Cole, Toronto, ON; Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, Ireland; Western Exhibitions, Chicago, IL; Artpace, San Antonio, TX; McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX; and Lulu, Mexico Ciy, Mexico. Group exhibitions include Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France; Chinati Foundation, Marfa, TX; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; White Columns and Martos Gallery, New York; Hannah Hoffman Gallery and Roberts & Tilton Gallery, Los Angeles; and Galeria Fortes D’aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo, Brazil. Rodriguez is included in the forthcoming exhibition The Botanical Mind at the Camden Arts Centre, London. He lives and works in San Antonio, Texas.

For further information, please contact gallery@nicellebeauchene.com

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