Hotwells, by Daniel Rios Rodriguez, at the Kerlin Gallery in Dublin
We had, by Irish standards, a long, hot summer, but not quite up to the level of the summer that informs the work of San Antonio-based Daniel Rios Rodriguez in Bite The Tongue. Rios Rodriguez lives in the San Antonio river valley in south Texas. The river flows southeast and drains into the Gulf of Mexico via the Guadalupe river. Rios Rodriguez habitually walks along its path, this summer under a scorching sun. He gathers things as he goes, scraps deposited by the current, pebbles smoothed by its flow.
He incorporates some of these objects into the works he makes, which are more assemblages than paintings, though oil paint is a dominant ingredient, applied in thick, clotted masses of usually flat colour. In the past he has made quite elaborate constructions, but all the work in Bite The Tongue adheres to a circular or star-like format. The sun and the moon (with two pieces devoted to each respectively suggest), reign over all of the work, emphasising the daily cycle of time. In a precise though rough-hewn way he uses coarse rope and nails to frame the compositions, and to define forms and areas within the compositions, producing an effect like cloisonné enamel writ large.
Early on, while still a student, Irish artist Michael Cullen, travelling with artist Michael Mulcahy, went to Spain and on to North Africa. The work he exhibited on his return was like nothing else in Irish art at the time and had much in common with the tenor and intensity of Rios Rodriguez’s paintings. They are stark, diagrammatic, with a quasi ritualistic quality, as though rehearsing a symbolic iconography. Not that he is making pastiches of such artefacts with their sacred meanings. He is drawing on that visual language, and there is a sense of the sacred in his assemblages, doubtless informed by his experience of being in the landscape. He also draws on other, perhaps more readily familiar aspect of visual culture, including still-life painting.
He has noted the relevance of the eccentric Texan painter Forrest Bess. Something of a reclusive outsider, by choice, Bess made his living as a fisherman. He did have a profile in the art world, though it’s fair to say that his reputation has really grown fairly recently (he died in 1977). Inspired by, and perhaps fixated on, inner visions, he was intent on achieving an hermaphroditic state – which he did – convinced that it would lead to immortality, which it didn’t. He is one of those figures who produce remarkable work outside the conventional theoretical framework, and there is an element of that to Rios Rodriguez’s own approach.
