Art And Museums in NYC This Week

Daniel Rios Rodriguez: "Controlled Burn" at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery (closes on May 21). This San Antonio-based artist’s toothsome little panel paintings are like present-day icons devoted to nature and abstraction that also take tips from the early modernists who merged them. Rotating among plant forms, glimpses of outer space and schematic self-portraits, they are indebted to Marsden Hartley’s robust brushwork and rich palette, Forrest Bess’s visionary quirkiness and Arthur Dove’s collage-assemblages. Built as much as painted, they are supplemented with marbles; dried weeds; ribbon; small stones; and scraps of wood, shingle and jewelry — all of which enhance the votive quality. There’s also rope, sometimes burned and sometimes used for framing, echoing Picasso’s famous 1912 “Still Life With Chair Caning.” Occasionally the edges break out in jagged zigzags. In the radiant “Jumbo,” they might be sunbeams, or signs of the discovery of the Higgs boson.