Melissa Rios: En los márgenes de lo que llamabas realidad

JO-HS NY is thrilled to present En los márgenes de lo que llamabas realidad, an exhibition of new paintings by Melissa Ríos. The artist's second solo exhibition at JO-HS NY, the exhibition features a selection of large paintings Ríos made while a resident at the Mack Residency in Greenpoint, Brooklyn during the summer of 2024.

Installation views

Each painting featured in this exhibition is inspired by an image, idea, or emotion that Ríos wants to unpack and explore. She begins by collaging photographs, graphics, and found images, developing a preliminary plan for the painted composition. This plan changes as Ríos paints; certain elements demand development and novel connections announce themselves. Approaching painting as a means of investigation and discovery, Ríos comes to a fuller understanding of the material and transcendent factors that shape experience through her painting practice.

Ríos’s paintings splice together fragments of seen and unseen worlds. Fragmented figures, objects, architectural elements and abstract forms are contained in interlocking fluid shapes suggestive of both natural openings and violent incursions into the canvas. The artist takes a sensuous approach to the painted surface, inviting viewers to luxuriate in the curve of a hand, the arch of a back, or in light glistening off water. Theatrical drapery evokes the image of a stage curtain, eliciting the sense that the real and the fantastical are separated by a mere membrane. In Ríos’s hands, the canvas becomes this membrane, the medium through which different facets of experience, both material and transcendent, commune and reconcile.

Ríos is keenly attuned to the productive tension between opposites. She deftly navigates polarities like lightness and darkness, presence and absence, and connection and alienation. In this new work, Ríos has deepened her examination of shadow and its relationship to presence. In several paintings shadows stand in for figures. These indices of presence are contrasted with the amorphous black holes that appear in every painting by Ríos. Occluding other elements from view, these masses of black pigment seem at once to be impenetrable matter and void. Resisting interpretation, these swathes of black paint remind viewers that information is always partial, and the process of meaning-making is never complete.

Selected Works

Artist’s Biography 

Melissa Ríos (b. 1986, Costa Rica)

Based in Mexico City, Melissa Ríos works primarily in painting and drawing. Mining the fertile ground between figuration and abstraction, Ríos seeks to expand understandings of reality and its representation.

Ríos paints surreal, dream-like visions. Figures, objects, and abstracts overlap and aggregate like veils mediating between realms of experience. Full of emotional charge and presence, the paintings imagine the spaces between the physical and metaphysical, between imagination and experience.

With training in architecture and advertising, Ríos is a multidisciplinary artist and thinker. She is often involved in multiple projects at a time, taking on roles in art direction, interior design, product design, furniture and photography. She has shown in solo exhibitions in Mexico City, Costa Rica, and New York City. Ríos’s work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions with JO-HS in Mexico City and New York; her paintings were featured by JO-HS at Zona MACO 2023, where one painting was a finalist for the prestigious Erarta Foundation Prize.