Jorge Rios

Overview

I don’t have a clear sense of my own personality. That's why I privilege stylistic diversity over identity and recognizability. My work exists in a protoplasmic state—a mirror on which different artistic movements and pictorial attitudes coexist. It’s an unanswered question about the possibilities and relevance of painting as a discipline.

- Jorge Rios

My most recent process-based work is rooted in the history of abstraction and occupies the unsettled territory between spontaneity and extreme control. It is inspired by ideas about visual perception and painterly conventions. I like to juxtapose brushstrokes, drips, and stains along with graphic grids, stripes and flat color fields. These different modes of painting reference historically divergent approaches to painting such as spontaneity versus intentionality, accident vis a vis control, as well as fast and slow mark-making. This is an attempt to blur the line between aesthetic trickery and artistic sincerity.

I’m attracted to how fundamental opposites find synthesis in the experience of the work of art, which for me is artifice (construction, illusion, deception) and truth (actuality, emotion, transformation) simultaneously.

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Works

Biography

The most important intellectual influences in my life derive directly from my Cuban and Latin American identity. I grew up an avid consumer of Magical Realism literature, especially the work of Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Rulfo, Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, and the Cuban Alejo Carpentier, who developed the term “Lo Real Maravilloso” (The Marvelous Real) to describe the fantastical quality of Latin American history and culture: where the everyday life is intrinsically mixed with pre-Columbian indigenous mysticism, the Spanish Catholic dogma and African pantheistic religions.

- Jorge Rios

Jorge Rios holds a BA in painting from the National Academy of Arts “San Alejandro” in Havana, Cuba. In 2021 earned his BFA at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Currently enrolled in the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis.

The work of Jorge Rios transcends the flatness of ordinary visual language reaching the subtlety, ambivalence and complexity that we perceive more clearly like in other art forms such as music or poetry. Rios tries to establish through his art a link between the individual experience of reality and the totality of existence. Whether you call it God, the Truth, the Idea, the Spirit, the Da-sein, the Being, or the Nothingness… In other words, “art for me has the mission of redeeming the being out of the mundanity of the human condition, by stimulating what is divine, universal and eternal in it.”

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Exhibitions