Jorge Rios’ work is rooted in the history of abstraction and driven by process. He combines gestural brushstrokes, drips, and stains with graphic elements like grids and patterns rendered in highly saturated pigments. Recurring motifs such as the black-and-white grid carry layered meaning, connecting modernist ideals to the artist's upbringing in Havana, Cuba, where utopian rhetoric and cultural contradiction were facts of daily life. Emigrating to the United States in 2013, the artist has remained attuned to states of flux and dislocation, conditions that find form in paintings where opposing forces like artifice and sincerity, structure and accident, coexist without resolution. Stylistically varied and resistant to a fixed identity, the work uses abstraction as a site of open questioning rather than certainty.
"I prioritize stylistic variety over a consistent visual identity. My paintings are like a funhouse mirror on which different artistic movements and attitudes are reflected while conveying a sense of ongoing jest” - Jorge Rios
Jorge Rios trained at the National Academy of Beaux Arts “San Alejandro” in Havana, Cuba before going on to study at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he was awarded the Presidential Merit Scholarship in 2019. In 2023 he earned his Master of Fine Arts from Washington University in St. Louis. MO. The artist has had solo exhibitions in Havana, Miami among others, and has participated in group shows in Spain, Italy, Mexico and the USA.
www.jorgerios.net
