Ángel Ricardo Ricardo Ríos & Cédrix Crespel: Sensual Dreams

Solana Beach, California- Madison Gallery announces Sensual Dreams, a visual exploration of hedonism, seduction and carnal desire, featuring works on canvas from French painter Cédrix Crespel and Cuban born Ángel Ricardo Ríos. In this exhibition, Cédrix Crespel offers a front row seat to his nearly three decades long love affair with his wife and muse, Tiphaine while Angel Ricardo Rios introduces us to his fantasies, a secret garden, a dreamscape of arousal. Both executing in bold color and brushstroke, compelling the viewer to come further into their worlds, share their fantasies and ultimately leaving us weak in the knees.

"Abstraction? Figuration? The two spaces coexist here without ignoring each other with the hope of a possible symbiosis between what the painter and the lover know, what they can say and everything that vibrates beyond exhausted words. Because the image freezes within the limits of the form. However, time has told us, love is a dance where the fluidity of each new movement calls for possibilities, suggestion and resonances of the eternal." - Cédrix Crespel

Cédrix Crespel is an artist who symbolizes a generation open to its era culture. He examines the representation of one woman. In the middle of the 90s, aware of the need for artists to lay down roots in their culture, he soon abandoned academic drawing, renounced pencils and lines, inventing a figurative form of expression. His painting is a sensual odyssey an adaptation of images of independent and passionate women who defy roles that society wants to give them. He teaches us, whether we like it or not, to get rid of our certainties to enter a universe where his women love to be coveted in this way. From the tension in desire to the obsessions haunting him, Cédrix Crespel implies the sexual and sensual, and the reverse. For four years now, it is no longer a question of painting the muse but of showing the couple in a relationship to absolute love.

“The blur, the background, the underside is the subject. It fixes Her image. From a distance, on the surface, I apply what represents me with my historic practice. By these two techniques I create a depth of field comparable to photography.
The distance between these two layers is precisely what I focus on, what I seek to paint. a ‘3rd entity’ ‘the link that connects us’, the unpaintable, the unrepresentable.” - Cédrix Crespel 

“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 Ríos

Ángel 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.  With a quick, sure hand, or made using his body to apply paint, Ríos’ meld of Expressionist and Neobaroque recalls the theatrical presence celebrated in Spanish Baroque. 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. Juxtaposed to this is one that is more relaxed and direct. 

Madison Gallery was founded by Lorna York in 2001. The program focuses on internationally recognized, museum-level artists whose work contributes to domestic and international cultural dialogue. The gallery presents significant Latin artists and brings international artists to San Diego for the first time. The core gallery program focuses on young and emerging artists, but
the gallery also punctuates the program with historical exhibitions to provide depth and context. 

Artists represented by Madison Gallery receive critical attention and are widely exhibited. Many of the gallery's primary artists, originally shown with Madison Gallery, are now being shown internationally and by established galleries in other cities, proving that the gallery has become a springboard for young talent.