There was much to reward scrupulous viewers of Daniel Rios Rodriguez’s fussed-over paintings, with their hand-built frames, graceful orchestrations of unruly color, and judiciously applied bits of canvas, semiprecious stones, gold leaf, and sculpted wire. In Midnight Electrician, 2025, a tiny pebble of turquoise seemed to regard itself in some nearby shards of mirror, which have been carefully set into the work’s frame. With our gaze scaled to the mineral’s point of view, the composition’s laborious details gradually come into riveting focus. A faceless figure climbs a floating staircase past a canvas-scrap lightning bolt and involuted-wire sun toward a mountaintop home ringed in an aureole of gold. From there, a magenta river wends downward to a green form resembling a snail shell, a shape partially derived from Mesoamerican virgulas—tonguelike spirals that signify speech.
Each of Rodriguez’s works is its own contained world. With talismanic charm, his abstracted landscapes depict anonymous figures and creatures who climb, fly, and float through trickily discernible portals, labyrinths, and mountains. Across multiple canvases, we saw black cats playing sentry in seated profile, emoji-like balls of fire erupting, blackbirds swooping, and a salmon-pink zigzag of mountain peaks, suggesting dimensionality and place while flattening the scene in one decisive gesture. The paintings contained all manner of material and symbolic detritus—ciphers, graphemes—gathered as much from art history as from Rodriguez’s wanderings along the San Antonio River near his home. One could have dutifully catalogued the sourced items present in these works, but most of the artist’s iconographic details do not readily yield their meaning. However, even as his symbolism is highly personal, it doesn’t come across as calculated or imperious. There is a generous sense of humor and wonder at all that a painting can contain while still remaining mysterious—perhaps even to its maker.
Rodriguez’s paintings contain frames within frames that multiply the edges of the support. In Casa Llena (Full House), 2012–25, and two of cups, 2025, gold leaf was secreted along the works’ sides and back edges, spatially activating areas we could barely see—indeed, we may rightly wonder what Easter eggs are hidden behind the artist’s canvases. With their complexly integrated layers, Rodriguez’s imagistic works forward a logic of symbolic and material accretion that gives even the smallest paintings a large presence. At just over fourteen by ten inches, A Tender Victory, 2012–25, depicted a green door—apparently a nod to Cézanne—that is ajar, through which escapes a flaming yellow light. Counteracting that gap is the work’s actual pillowy convexity. Overstuffed and bulging on its left side, the canvas itself seems to be a door about to open into the viewer’s space,a magic portal to who knows where. Punctuating this standoff between 2D and 3D space, the sharp end of a bright-red nail juts out near the door’s center and casts a true shadow, as if in riposte to the old Cubist trompe l’oeil joke in which the artist winkingly flattens his multidimensional forms with, say, a rendering of a single nail and its shadow (see, for instance, Braque’s Still-Life with Violin and Pitcher, 1909–10). Extending Cubism’s play with the grammar of illusionism, Rodriguez exploits the conjoined powers of visual representation and material instantiation to destabilize our perception of reality.
The largest works in the show, Sweet Fire and Open this wall, both 2024, were testaments to Rodriguez’s wide-ranging and scholarly syncretism. The paintings’ rough-hewn, graphic qualities treat 1980s neo-expressionism as something just as “ancient” and historically valuable as Mesoamerican architecture, synthetic Cubism, and Surrealism’s hallucinatory figuration. Among the works’ strongest qualities are their maximalist colors and horror vacui. These elements hearken back to the riotous work of the 1970s Los Angeles Chicano artist collective Los Four, especially the bold, illustrational work of group members Carlos Almaraz and Frank Romero. Rodriguez decolonizes art history not through overt critique but by diluting the singular force of European masters, crowding the ancestral scene with equally—if not more so—powerful and relevant sources.
