Ángel Ricardo Ricardo Ríos and Ernesto Garcia Sánchez: Territories of Form

San Diego CA - Madison Gallery presents TERRITORIES OF FORM, an exhibition bringing together new and recent work by Cuban-born artists Ángel Ricardo Ricardo Ríos (b. 1965) and Ernesto García Sánchez (b. 1989). Born nearly a quarter century apart and both now living and working in Mexico, the artists are united not by a shared aesthetic language, but by an enduring investigation into material, gesture, and the processes through which form comes into being.

The exhibition considers form as a territory: something constructed and disrupted, inhabited and transformed. Across painting and sculpture, Ríos and García Sánchez approach the making of an artwork as a physical negotiation between body, material, and space. Their practices unfold from markedly different positions, yet each resists the separation of idea from process. Meaning resides as much in the act of making as in the resulting object.

For Ernesto García Sánchez, TERRITORIES OF FORM brings two interconnected aspects of his practice into direct conversation. Large-scale works on linen are presented alongside smaller constructions in wood, establishing a dialogue between his pictorial and structural vocabularies and exploring the thread that connects the two processes.

Born in Havana in 1989, García Sánchez studied at the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts and later at Havana's Higher Institute of Art (ISA). His practice is rooted in an ongoing investigation of geometry, repetition, reduction, and the fractal-the point at which seemingly perfect forms break, multiply, and reorganize themselves into new systems.

There is an almost obsessive pursuit of synthesis within his work. Through a process of reduction, García Sánchez constructs imperfect geometries by hand, combining shape, surface, and texture until an object arrives at what appears to be its most essential configuration. Minimalism in his practice is therefore not simply an aesthetic position, but the consequence of a sustained process of distillation.

The relationship between painting and object is increasingly central to this investigation. Line becomes edge; plane becomes volume; composition moves beyond the painted surface and into physical space. Rather than positioning painting and sculpture as separate disciplines, García Sánchez allows one to continually inform the other.

This measured, constructive language finds a visceral counterpoint in the work of Ángel Ricardo Ricardo Ríos (b. 1965).

Born in Holguín, Cuba, Ríos graduated from the Higher Institute of Art in Havana. His practice is defined by an intensely physical relationship with painting. Pigment is applied directly and emphatically, at times with his hands and body, collapsing the conventional distance between painter and surface.

"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

Ríos' compositions occupy a shifting terrain between abstraction and figuration. Organic and vegetal forms proliferate across the surface, merging with suggestions of bodies, sexuality, abundance, and excess. Color accumulates through touch; forms collide, dissolve, and re-emerge. The resulting paintings possess an almost Baroque density while retaining the immediacy of their making.

There is pleasure in these works, but also instability. Ríos does not organize the painted field around a singular point of view. Instead, the eye moves through a continuous sequence of encounters in which figure and ground remain unresolved. His paintings become environments rather than images-spaces in which gesture, color, and corporeality coexist.

The distance between the practices of Ríos and García Sánchez is central to TERRITORIES OF FORM.

Where Ríos embraces accumulation, physicality, and chromatic intensity, García Sánchez employs reduction, structure, and material precision. Where one allows form to emerge through bodily gesture, the other searches for its essential state through construction and distillation.

Yet beneath these differences lies a shared proposition:

Form is not predetermined. It is discovered through making.

Their shared Cuban origins, generational distance, and subsequent lives and practices in Mexico introduce another understanding of territory-not simply as geography, but as a condition shaped by movement, memory, inheritance, and transformation.

Neither artist is positioned as representative of a singular national identity.

Instead, TERRITORIES OF FORM considers how artistic languages evolve across places and generations: what is carried forward, what is discarded, and what is reconstructed through the experience of making elsewhere.

In bringing these two practices together, the exhibition proposes the studio itself as a territory-a space in which inherited languages are tested, materials acquire their own intelligence, and new forms become possible.