An Interview with Daniel Rios Rodriguez

 

Daniel Rios Rodriguez (DRR): Sometime in 2017, I came across a run-down property on the southside of San Antonio with a tattered and weed covered “For Sale“ sign. The property itself was being sold by someone who inherited it and owed years’ worth of back taxes, so they were eager to work with me on the price in exchange for the labor involved to get it off The City of San Antonio’s condemned list. The entire property was overgrown and filled with garbage and buried carpets. I‘ve spent the last four years cleaning up, rebuilding and planting trees. I demolished one of the illegal structures and gutted the 900 square-foot house to turn it into an open floor plan studio. It’s a complete work in progress, but the transformation has in many ways paralleled and facilitated the growth of my work and myself. At this point the studio is just as much a work of art as any painting or sculpture.

 

DRR: Theaster has a far more ambitious agenda for his work as it relates to a social practice. For me, being a decent neighbor is important enough, and taking the time to talk to people in the neighborhood is a part of a small-scale social practice. My neighbors all know I‘m an artist and that I‘m there working daily.

 

DRR: I‘ve always thought of the San Antonio River as being modest in the same way the city itself is modest when compared to other large cities in Texas. The river is a place that holds a lot of fascination, memories, and life for me. In the last eight years it’s become a place where I‘ve returned to for solitude or activity with my children. Over time, I have developed an affection for certain bends and paths. I’ve watched the trees and riverbanks grow and change alongside the changes in my own life. It‘s also become an extension of my studio and where I do most of my critical and open thinking. In terms of its material nature, I‘ve spent a lot of time drawing and collecting bits of rubbish that I’d incorporate into my paintings. Unidentifiable bits of plastic and metal became the color and texture of my work, the wildlife and wildflowers became the imagery from which I drew upon, and the symbolic content was/is that of my love for my children and of love more broadly. I would paint regardless of the river, but the river inevitably washes up in my mind as I work.

 

DRR: Life is just organized differently in larger cities like New York. I felt I was always shuffling from one structure to another in order to survive, and the hustle to pay rent, raise kids, and paint was more than a full-time job. When my ex-wife, Veronica, and our kids, Paloma and Theo, and myself moved back to San Antonio, we essentially started over. It was at that point that I had massive amounts of time alone. I began to spend most of my time outside, because I found a studio apartment in the Lavaca neighborhood and was so close to the river. I also spent a lot more time reading, painting, and thinking about my kids who I was no longer living with. I missed what I had deeply, but was forging a new relationship with myself, with painting, and with San Antonio. The year I returned, I was also awarded the Louis Tiffany Comfort Foundation grant and that really did a lot for me in terms of giving me the time to work. In New York, I never felt I had enough time to work, and in San Antonio I had more time than ever. This changed everything.

 

DRR: My education at both UIC and Yale was hugely important, but it was anything but formal in training. You did not attend either of these schools to become a certain “kind“ of painter, but perhaps rather to confirm whether you were or weren‘t one. This is my own opinion of course, but on the whole my education was undogmatic. (I am resistant to dogma on the whole, which is also why my stint in the Air Force was short-lived.) That being said, I really had no idea what to do with paint, so it was inevitable that material exploration became a matter of course. What anyone does when they don’t know how to do something is to try and fail and try again. The incorporation of objects and materials into my work was not only a way to overcome my inabilities as a painter, it was also a way of getting to the point. Why paint snake skin if I can incorporate one? Why paint stones and feathers if they are the very things I pick up along my excursions? At this point I am not sure why any of this is seen outside the bounds of a painter’s language, but it is understandable considering that most painting of the last 200 years has been a battle of paint on canvas. If we dig a little deeper and look beyond Western art, we see painting/sculpture/architecture and the natural world all sharing the stage and sometimes a surface. My desire to do just that but on a much smaller scale was a natural move for me and not a calculated one. It was a way to embrace my inclinations as a builder and my desire to paint. That in itself, to be a painter, is still very much a mystery to me.

 

DRR: Now Since I have a studio and basically a permanent work/live space, I am free of a kind of anxiety that so many artists and non-artists alike live with — that of displacement or at worst, homelessness. Artists need both the space and the time in order to articulate our energies and ideas. This is why residencies are so valuable. This particular kind of ownership of my own creative space has really allowed me to craft a daily ritual of entering into a painting space on my own terms and without fear. I come and go as I please, and the rhythm I’ve established in relation to the neighborhood, my dogs, my plants, and finally to my studio all serve to keep me painting.