“I believe that painting with my hands transmits positivity and hope in the artwork. I like to touch and feel the paint that has an energy the paintbrush can’t transmit. The brush is too cold.” – Ángel Ricardo Ricardo Ríos

Ángel Ricardo Ricardo Ríos was born in Cuba in 1965 and is a graduate of the Higher Institute of Art in Havana Cuba. Employing a direct application of pigment to canvas, Ríos expresses in vibrant colors. Ríos’ work has an eagerness to it, a blur of boundaries within the space that it occupies. The mixing and intertwining of subjects give way to explosions of color, texture, shape. To understand Ríos’ work one must acknowledge two essential elements. The first is a playful, joyful and intimate relationship that takes the form of an intense, frenzied sexual nature within the composition.

Angel’s paintings often blend organic, vegetal forms with allusions to fantastic displays of excess. Expressed in vibrant colors with a quick, sure hand, or made using his body to apply paint, these expressionist and neo-baroque explorations appear part abstraction and part dreamscape, recalling the theatrical presence celebrated in the Spanish Baroque.

Rios has exhibited at numerous museums and galleries internationally, including Museum of Talavera, Puebla, Mexico; El Museum Gallery, Bogota, Colombia; Lucia de la Puente, Gallery, Peru; El Chope University Museum, DF, Mexico; Pradilla Gallery, Madrid, Spain; Jacobo Carpio Gallery, Costa Rica and Nina Menocal Gallery, DF, Mexico, among other venues. His work has been showcased at many international art fairs and biennials including the Havana Bienal, the National Biennial of Visual Arts in Yucatan, and the Rufino Tamayo Painting Biennial, Casablanca Biennale among others.