The Arts Center at Duck Creek in Springs will open two exhibitions on Saturday, with a reception from 5 to 7 p.m. “REDYELLOWPINK,” paintings by Jorge Rios, will be installed in the John Little Barn, and “Everything and Nothing,” Brent Richardson’s first solo show on the East End, will be on view in the Little Gallery.
Born and raised in Havana, Rios immigrated to the United States in 2013. In a statement on his website, the artist says that his work is driven by process and rooted in the history of abstraction. “I combine gestural brushstrokes, drips, and stains with graphic elements like grids and patterns, using highly saturated pigments on large canvases and paper. I prioritize stylistic variety over a consistent visual identity.”
Recurring motifs such as the black-and-white grid connect modernist ideals to Rios’s upbringing in Cuba, where utopian rhetoric and cultural contradiction were facts of daily life. He has remained attuned to states of flux and dislocation, says Duck Creek, reflected in paintings where opposing forces such as artifice and sincerity, structure and accident, coexist without being resolved.
Rios, who lives and works in New York City, earned a B.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2021 and an M.F.A. from Washington University in St. Louis in 2023. He has had solo shows in Havana and Miami, among others, and group exhibitions in Spain, Italy, Mexico, and the United States.
Richardson’s monochromatic drawings and paintings are inspired in part by the speed, light, and seduction of custom car culture, music, and film. Surreal, futuristic, and dynamic, they feature whirling, swirling, biomorphic forms that threaten to fly off the canvas.
Jean-Christophe Castelli, whose father, Leo Castelli, gave Richardson his first show, described his work has having eyes “that point in all different directions — to art of the past (Matta, early Mondrian), psychedelic comics and posters, the duck-rabbit optical illusions of Jasper Johns, B movies, hotrods, Loony Tunes and Popeye, all dancing around to a dissonant, surf-guitar soundtrack.”
The coastal landscape of Montauk, where Richardson lives, works, and surfs, appears in his work not as subject matter, but as atmosphere — a tidal stage for his restless cosmic glyphs, says the gallery.
With a B.A. from San Francisco State University, Richardson moved from Berkeley, Calif., to Manhattan in the early ‘80s to work for Robert Rauschenberg and Tibor Kalman, designed an album cover for AC/DC, and designed and drew various projects with Diane Keaton. His work is in private and corporate collections in the United States.
Both shows will continue through Aug. 2.
