Daniel Rios Rodriguez

COOPER COLE is pleased to present Father Time, a solo exhibition of the work of Daniel Rios Rodriguez. This is the artist’s third exhibition at the gallery.

Daniel Rios Rodriguez takes inspiration from his environment, his children, and his dreams. His paintings are a unique combination of abstracted images created using common and found materials as well as paint. The work intentionally touches on disparate motifs from the history of painting including landscape, still life, memento mori, and self portraiture. These varied and abstracted constructions serve to narrate Rodriguez’s personal life in a way that bridges the gap between common experiences and the world of painting as exploration.

Rios Rodriguez’s works are extensions of his context; the materials he uses are purchased or found in his immediate environment, and often include found wood, stone, terracotta, glass, rope, and nails, in addition to paint and canvas. The artist views them as a type of symbolic self-portraiture in that they shed light on personal experiences within common forms and ideas. The terracotta sun, for example, is a common decorative object seen hanging outside many homes in the South West United States, where the artist lives. Purchased  from a nursery that imports such objects from Mexico, Rodriguez painted them as self-portraits, imagining himself as a kind of hovering father figure trickster. With an emphasis on the visibly handmade, Rios Rodriguez embraces the natural imperfections and grittiness of his media, and works to maintain their natural energies even as they are repurposed into his work; his works eschew direct representation, opting instead to contain fragments of his context.

The motifs in Rios Rodriguez’s paintings maintain a similar ambiguity. While it may be instinctual to look for narratives in the objects depicted in these new paintings, they are in fact reflections of hybrid identities and spaces. A shell, for example, could represent the artist, his studio, a cell, or a garden, all of which are related to his direct context, including his dreams. Rios Rodriguez does not separate his obligations as a father, artist, or partner from intellectual spaces. A father can be an artist; a home can be a museum; a studio can be a home. Rios Rodriguez’s dreams—which, he explains, are mostly about landscapes— spill into his work, and imagery can veer into the fantastical and surreal. The only direct symbolism, according to the artist, is that anything in a set of three represents his children.

Father Time brackets a period in Rios Rodriguez’s life in which he has been deeply engaged with his children. Within this temporal framework, his studio practice has woven with these familial relationships, emphasizing that one subject can be multiple. As the objects he picks up as he walks his children to school later appear in his work, so can his paintings influence his children’s understanding of the world around them. This body of work represents the cyclical nature of creation and growth. 

Daniel Rios Rodriguez (b. 1978, Killeen, Texas, USA) received his BFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2005 and an MFA from Yale University in 2007. Rodriguez was a recipient of the 2013 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, and has exhibited at galleries and museums internationally. Select gallery exhibitions include Various Small Fires, Dallas (2022); Kerlin Gallery, Dublin (2021, 2018); Camden Art Centre, London (2020); Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York (2020); i8 Gallery, Reykjavik (2018); Galeria Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo, Brazil (2017); Lulu, Mexico City (2016); Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles (2016); James Harris Gallery, Seattle (2015); and Martos Gallery, New York (2013). Select museum exhibitions include the San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio (2019); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2019); the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston (2018); McNay Art Museum, San Antonio (2015); and White Columns, New York (2011). Rodriguez lives and works in San Antonio, Texas, USA.