Pan American Art Projects is pleased to present Jorge Rios’s third solo exhibition at the gallery titled “for my next trick…” The show will include paintings made in the last two years. This series of works continues his investigation of visual perception, painting conventions and the process of creation.

Rios is inspired by how fundamental opposites find synthesis in the experience of the work of art, which for him is both artifice (construction, illusion, deception) and truth (actuality, emotion, transformation) simultaneously.

In the works on view, gestural brushstrokes, drips, and stains coexist with graphic grids, stripes and flat color fields. These different modes of painting reference historically divergent approaches to abstraction, such as spontaneity versus intentionality, fast and slow mark-making and accident vis-a-vis control. This is a way for the artist to blur the line between aesthetic trickery and artistic sincerity.

I don’t have a clear sense of my own personality. That’s why I privilege stylistic diversity over identity and recognizability. My work exists in a protoplasmic state—a mirror on which different artistic movements and pictorial attitudes coexist. The only constant throughout my career is the fact that I’m perpetually committed to both: the history and practice of painting.