A steady interaction between the bodily, psychological and non secular dimensions of actuality defines the work of American Dominican artist Kenny Rivero. This symbolic layering is particularly vivid within the new works featured in his newest exhibition, “Ash on All the things,” on view at Charles Moffett, New York, by way of January 24. His first New York present in over three years, the presentation reveals a transparent evolution in Rivero’s follow—each technically and conceptually. These works mirror a heightened consciousness of the common resonance his subject material can evoke, alongside a rising confidence in translating his expansive mythopoetic world onto canvas.
A brand new materials richness matches the densely layered cultural references in these works. Rivero adopts a looser method to portray, experimenting with assorted methods and incorporating real-world parts. The result’s a collage of lived experiences interwoven with inner, psychological and non secular realms—a posh orchestration that invitations a extra soulful studying of the world.
About fifteen years in the past, Rivero was working nearly solely in collage earlier than shifting to extra conventional approaches on canvas. “This time, particularly with the notes, I needed one thing extra actual—supplies that had been older, archival, issues I had collected,” he tells Observer. “Objects that had an aura, that carried power, that had lived in my studio and collected tales.”
But his method to grease portray is very tactile and bodily, with passages the place thick paint turns into strikingly plastic—a component unto itself—and others the place the artist’s hand is visibly current in direct, gestural marks on the canvas. “I would like the portray to really feel prefer it was made by a hand,” he clarifies. “To make that presence simple. That’s actually vital to me.”
His work has lengthy drawn from private expertise, formed by his upbringing in Washington Heights because the little one of Dominican mother and father and the each day challenges of diasporic life—an expertise he has constantly sought to deconstruct and course of by way of portray. On this new physique of labor, nonetheless, Rivero delves even additional into the previous, transmuting private reminiscences and traumas right into a extra common epic that hyperlinks the on a regular basis struggles of city existence to realms past the bounds of time-bound bodily actuality.
In these work, time collapses—previous, current and future blur and coexist, reaching towards one thing everlasting. “It’s not nostalgia. It’s reframing time to disclose one thing common in regards to the human situation,” he says. “I’m constructing a fiction. I’m telling a narrative, however it’s not essentially my story.” Whereas his earlier work was deeply autobiographical, this physique marks a shift. “It nonetheless pertains to me within the sense that it attracts from my expertise of being in New York and being Dominican, however the story takes place exterior of me and has nothing to do with my childhood, my private historical past, or my household. It’s a completely new story, one which exists past me, and that feels very new for my work.”
As Rivero reveals, it was solely up to now few months that he was capable of acknowledge the narrative taking form throughout the work totally. “About two months in the past is once I actually began to see the place the work had been going—the place the photographs would finally land and the place the story was starting to kind. Up till then, the whole lot was popping out of the method itself: interested by coloration, and actually desirous to concentrate on the determine greater than I had earlier than.”
Rivero’s course of is, actually, deeply intuitive. By surrendering to it, he can channel and translate symbolic narratives onto the canvas—narratives that precede language or rational frameworks. A self-taught artist who moved from working as an evening doorman and Zwirner custodian to promoting out at main artwork gala’s, Rivero has developed and preserved an unique symbolic lexicon that continues to be untouched by tendencies or the conventions of conventional figurative portray.
Because of this, his characters usually seem cartoonish or seemingly naïve—qualities that regularly reveal themselves as hauntingly symbolic and archetypal. These ghostly, hybrid figures—half human, half monster—emerge like spirits from one other realm, trying to speak one thing simply past attain. “They’re impressed by very particular folks rising from the previous, however they’re not autobiographical—they’re much extra common,” Rivero explains. “With this physique of labor, I’m beginning to develop particular characters: they’ve identities, they operate extra like varieties and archetypes.”
Rivero’s characters are, on this sense, nearer to the Latin idea of character or maschera: figures that signify human varieties moderately than particular person portraits. They function much less as autobiographical stand-ins than as constructed roles—embodiments of shared situations, gestures and psychic states. Every carries an identification, however one that’s symbolic moderately than private, formed by collective expertise moderately than non-public reminiscence.
“The characters assist one another throughout the world I’m constructing. They operate nearly like a staff. They’re on a mission collectively, attempting to assist each other in attempting to speak one thing,” Rivero displays.
From this early a part of our dialog, it turns into clear that these new works take up the human journey from a broader, extra common perspective: a shared seek for which means, particularly inside political, financial and social programs which are far bigger than the person and sometimes alienate us from what is crucial, primal and rooted in being—on the earth, and in time.
Non secular content material has all the time coursed by way of Rivero’s work, formed by a spiritual upbringing that fused Christianity, Catholicism and Afro-Caribbean non secular practices. This hybrid basis enabled him to kind an idiosyncratic symbolic language that finds full expression in his work, permitting for a syncretic exploration of perception programs and their shared understandings of the afterlife, divination and ancestral connection. Whereas his ghostly, usually faceless figures most clearly reference Santería and Afro-Caribbean traditions, Christian iconographies—notably these associated to saints—are subtly interwoven into the painterly narrative, as seen in No Ice (Sin Yellow), 2025.
On the similar time, parts of fashionable tradition and concrete vernacular are seamlessly woven into the work, suggesting how the non secular and mythological can coexist throughout the concrete framework of a metropolis like New York. The brick partitions of public housing, concrete sidewalks, town’s streetscape and the silhouettes of chimney-lined industrial crops seem alongside symbols drawn from Afro-Caribbean each day rituals, as seen in cryptic but evocative works like Shadow Mirror (2025). Collectively, these parts mirror Rivero’s ongoing train in world-building—one thing he says he’s practiced since childhood, even throughout the materials and non secular constraints of life in Washington Heights.
But even probably the most mundane, terrestrial types are charged with symbolic which means. Gentle bulbs, for instance, recur throughout a number of works. “There’s the literal thought of energy—electrical energy—and the way unstable entry to energy will be within the Caribbean. However there’s additionally energy in a extra summary, non secular sense. In some work, just like the mirror portray, energy isn’t about electrical energy in any respect. The ability the sunshine bulbs are dropping isn’t electrical—it’s non secular. They’re meant to light up the determine differently.”
In Navigator (2025), the sunshine bulbs activate one other means of seeing—one which opens onto a parallel actuality imagined or envisioned by the figures and projected throughout the room in Sub Upkeep (crimson shadow) (2025). Collectively, the 2 work set in movement a community of symbolic correspondences that intensify their luminous, metaphysical cost.
Each aspect that seems in Rivero’s work is tied to a spot he has recognized. “Rising up in Washington Heights, there have been deserted buildings we used to play in as children. Within the Dominican Republic, too—empty homes we’d use for various issues,” he remembers. “That’s the place I realized to construct worlds, and to grasp the connection between actuality and fantasy. These areas had been open to interpretation and reimagination.”
Creativeness, by way of this train in world-building, provided Rivero a sort of sanctuary—a approach to step exterior the boundaries of childhood actuality. Portray allowed him to proceed that follow. “Within the work, time collapses—previous, current, and future exist collectively. It’s not nostalgia. It’s reframing time to disclose one thing common in regards to the human situation,” he provides.
Even probably the most cheerful, cartoonish parts borrowed from fashionable tradition—notably Caribbean tradition, with its vibrant colours and kinetic power—are tempered by a darker undercurrent and non secular weight. “There’s all the time that darker aspect. Disaster, trauma—whether or not that trauma is colonial, or extra up to date, tied to nature, to hurricanes, to environmental situations,” Rivero notes, pointing to the recurring airplanes, bombs and explosions that course by way of his compositions.
A way of ongoing emergency unfolds throughout the works. “Everybody depicted in these work is functioning inside a disaster—some sort of post-apocalyptic scenario, or a minimum of a second of urgency,” Rivero confirms. “They’re attempting to speak with one another in secret, and that’s the place the notes are available in.”
On this exhibition, he elevates that interweaving right into a layered meta-narrative. Small notes are embedded inside bigger compositions—tucked into waistbands, hidden below baseball mitts, set aflame at sea or rising from sliced apples. In a sequence of trompe l’oeil-style work, these notes are then unfolded, revealing coded messages that learn like survival directions, drawing on ancestral information formed by generations of bodily and psychological wrestle.
This construction invitations a deeper type of viewer engagement. The viewers is named to observe the story’s thread, piecing collectively fragments that join throughout the works. “I would like the viewer to start unpacking the story,” he explains. “My hope is that viewers will spend time with the work, sit with them, and begin to perceive how they communicate to 1 one other.”
Whereas Rivero embraces the inherent openness and ambiguity of portray—and acknowledges that no single interpretation will be definitive—he means that which means arises by way of the relationships between works. The narrative unfolds much less by way of decoding mounted symbols than by way of attunement to delicate clues and a willingness to have interaction in shared resonance. That portray, he says, units the whole lot up: “It establishes easy methods to learn the symbols within the present and defines the house through which the whole lot is going on. The story then builds towards an ending that looks like an explosion. That’s what the bomb represents for me—not simply destruction, however renewal. It’s about imagining easy methods to construct the following world.”
The works on view gesture towards a reality that transcends particular person expertise and on a regular basis disaster. They provide a glimpse right into a broader, extra common perspective—one which exceeds linear time and reconnects with one thing important about human life as half of a bigger complete. Right here, the canvas turns into a portal—an entry level into different symbolic programs and dimensions. His work operate as units that open onto non secular and ancestral planes, the place a primal sense of reality will be rediscovered past the constructs of up to date life. They’re directly devices of therapeutic, resistance towards cultural erasure and acts of reconnection with the ancestral.
Like up to date parables of the human situation, Rivero’s figures inhabit a metaphorical realm—an in-between dimension that acts much less as illustration and extra as a threshold. This symbolic discipline permits private experiences to broaden into shared understanding, giving kind to what’s hidden, repressed or troublesome to articulate. The sequencing of works within the exhibition is intentional. As soon as they got here collectively, Rivero may understand the narrative they collectively revealed. The journey—by way of delivery, coming of age, loss, decay and renewal—begins with a big portray of a sidewalk and a lady on fireplace, and concludes with a monumental picture of a coconut bomb on the verge of explosion, bringing this mythic epic to a detailed.
Echoing Victor Turner, the liminal terrain these pictures occupy is marked by instability, transformation and ritual disaster: a “betwixt and between” section important to rites of passage, through which people are stripped of former identities and communal roles, with out but having assumed new ones. But it’s exactly this in-betweenness that allows Rivero’s figures to exist not totally in a single world or one other, however suspended between collapse and renewal, destruction and risk.
In constructing his personal city mythology, Rivero charts this transitional house as certainly one of potential moderately than decision. Fireplace, explosions, coded messages and fractured architectures function indicators of passage, not finality—staging a collective crossing by way of a second of historic uncertainty. Inside this symbolic framework, the coconut emerges as a central anchor. Rooted in Afro-Caribbean cosmologies and divinatory practices, it’s carefully tied to Ifá, the non secular system Rivero follows. In that custom, the coconut is used to hunt steerage from ancestors and spirits—however solely by way of the act of breaking. For Rivero, that gesture encapsulates the exhibition’s core logic: transformation, information and renewal come up not by way of preservation, however by way of rupture. As Mircea Eliade suggests, right here destruction is just not merely an finish, however a needed act by way of which which means is restored and renewed.
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