Curator on the Go

“I believe that painting with my hands transmits positivity and hope in the artwork. I like to touch and feel the paint that has an energy the paintbrush can’t transmit. The brush is too cold.”
– Ángel Ricardo Ricardo Ríos
 
Ángel Ricardo Ricardo Ríos Angel Ricardo Ricardo Rios was born in Cuba in 1965. Employing a direct application of pigment to canvas, Ríos expresses in vibrant colors. His work has an eagerness to it, a blur of boundaries within the space that it occupies. The mixing and intertwining of subjects give way to explosions of color, texture, and shape. 

To understand Ríos’ work, one must acknowledge two essential elements. The first is a playful, joyful and intimate relationship that takes the form of an intense, frenzied sexual nature within the composition.

Angel’s paintings often blend organic, vegetal forms with allusions to fantastic displays of excess. Expressed in vibrant colors with a quick, sure hand, or made using his body to apply paint, these expressionist and neo-baroque explorations appear part abstraction and part dreamscape, recalling the theatrical presence celebrated in the Spanish Baroque.

In love with Mariko Kobayashi's work 😍

Mariko Kobayashi Mariko Kobayashi / 小林万里子 (b. 1987, Osaka, Japan) graduated with an MA in Fine Art Textile at Tama Art Universi- ty in 2012. The artist depicts various connections in the world through textile techniques such as weaving, dyeing, knitting, and stitching. Her artistic concept is based on the awareness of being conscious in the present moment, as we continue our lives as mortal beings. Kobayashi’s work traces the long journey of how the flesh, the physical body that separates humans and animals, returns to the earth, and continues a new life after reincarnation. Her exploration attempts to unravel the essential form of life, which is rendered in chaos created by the overlaying of colours and shapes from different materials.

David Smalling (b. Kingston, Jamaica) is a New York City-based artist who
explores how taboos and cultural hierarchies shape the way we see ourselves and others.

“I’m interested in how beauty, shame, and aspiration get encoded into the image and how the surface of a painting can reveal the deeper mechanics of desire and fear.

I draw from the language of Old Master portraiture and the theatricality of fashion and mise-en-scène. The figures in my paintings often hover between sincerity and satire, parody and confession. They come from my own life (from friendships and betrayals, from intimacy and ambition) refracted through the aesthetic systems I grew up revering and resisting.

The paintings are, in a sense, self-portraits of negotiation: between histories, between the person I was taught to be and the one I became. I think of my practice as a kind of reconstruction. Each work borrows from Mannerism and the Dutch Golden Age — traditions built on illusion — but I use those same techniques to undo the illusions themselves. Within the lacquered surfaces and artificial light, I’m searching for something closer to truth: a recognition that artifice, too, can be honest.”