Controlled Burn
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.