January 18 - March 8, 2025
From Sicardi Ayers Bacino:
“About the paintings of Merged with Vastness, Camargo wrote, “Landscape is the central theme in Miguel Angel Rios’ most recent work, where pilgrimage becomes a metaphor to explore the space in which figure and environment dissolve into each other, creating tensions between the material and the spiritual, the visible and the imperceptible.” Although their style may appear as an amalgam of Georgia O’Keeffe’s and Fauve landscapes, more than the result of an aesthetic stylistic decision, Rios’ paintings are the translation of a mystic experience. Ríos has responded depicting vibrant landscapes, himself, and a handful of living organisms (dogs, cacti, soil, sky) that stand separately yet together in the same horizon of being. Their intense colors are the hues of enhanced or altered perception. Camargo sums it up thus, “In the current production, the figure is blurred in the environment, giving way to the immensity of the landscape, which now represents the journey of the wanderer without a destination but with a purpose of pursuing light.”
Although Ríos’s astounding videos Landlocked (2014) and Mulas (2014) seem to be a different matter altogether, one senses that they arise from a different way of perceiving the world. Their ingenious conception involves an intimate insight on animal behavior. In order to make the dogs complicit in Landlocked, one really has to have a glimpse of how they experience the world (internalizing the experience of an animal is a stepping stone of an ayahuasca journey). In spite of the known behavior of domesticated equines instinctively seeking to return to their stables, the mules of Mules are not less enigmatic for their journey is nothing short of prodigious. Both Landlocked and Mulas are magnificent metaphors for search, endurance and destiny.”
Reception: January 18, 2025 | 6–8 pm
1506 West Alabama
Houston, 77098 TX
(713) 529-1313
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