Kerlin Gallery is delighted to announce its first solo exhibition with the San Antonio-based artist Daniel Rios Rodriguez, Bite the Tongue. Following on from his inclusion in a group exhibition at Kerlin Gallery in 2017, Rios Rodriguez will return to the gallery to present an exhibition of new paintings from 27 August – 29 September.

Daniel Rios Rodriguez makes intimate and exuberant semi-figurative paintings on wooden panels. His subject matter is rooted in the natural world, drawing upon traditions of landscape, folk painting and momento mori to blend images of plants, animals, suns, moons and mountains with powerful and fantastical kaleidoscopic visions. The paintings in Bite the Tongue were produced throughout the summer of 2018, in which temperatures in San Antonio have reached 39°C (and counting). Made in this intense equatorial climate, the paintings harness the heat and energy of the South Texan sun into vivid vignettes of radiant colour and vibrating pattern.

Rios Rodriguez works on a modest scale, building coarse layers of impasto paint upon panels of irregular shapes – in this instance, circular and starburst forms varying from 40 to 120 cm in diameter. Past work has incorporated collaged elements of organic detritus, giving it a talismanic quality and prompting The New York Time’s Roberta Smith to draw comparison to the tradition of votive painting (small, usually anonymous paintings on panel that are produced as offerings). In truth, the artist’s influences are hybrid – looking towards vernacular figures like the self-taught Texan painter Forrest Bess as much as the canon of European Modernism. As pointed out by Kyle MacMillan in Art in America, “Daniel Rios Rodriguez’s quirky, unassuming paintings don’t fall into any easily recognisable niche or category”.

Rios Rodriguez earned an MFA from Yale School of Art in 2007. Current and forthcoming exhibitions include Right Here, Right Now: San Antonio, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (28 April – 5 August 2018); It was literally the wreck of jewels and the crash of gems, a two-person exhibition with Kate Newby, Nicelle Beauchene, New York (28 June – 17 August 2018) and a solo show at San Antonio Museum of Art, Texas (2019).