For now, he knows he doesn’t want to force them to be ready he’s still playing around. He slides one canvas out of the way only to reveal another and another, each waiting its turn for more licks of color, a flame or another motif, a cryptic phrase, or an altogether different kind of spell. The sun is fading in the afternoon, and outside Rivero’s window cars crawl across the Robert F. It’s fitting that the artist has taken a class on magic, and that he continues to read up on the subject behind his playful sleights of hand is a rigorous artistic practice. “These paintings are so minimal that it’s made me slow down a bit,” he says. It feels like a chore.” For the new show, he’s working against the clock, producing more than two dozen pieces in a few months, although only half or so will make the final cut. I would love it if I was a kind of artist that sketched things out first, but I get bored. “There’s something about discovering and improvising that feels really good. Even with a loaded schedule, Rivero does not plan out his work in advance. Over the past several years, he’s been on a tear, with solo shows in Los Angeles, Mexico City, Arkansas, New York, Vermont and Delaware.
Rivero’s breakthrough came in his hometown, at El Museo del Barrio’s “La Bienal 2013: Here Is Where We Jump,” when his art received praise in The New Yorker. It’s part of my life, but I’m making work. “It’s hard to avoid sensationalizing the ‘from the streets to Yale’ narrative. The heritage and belief systems that have shaped him come to the fore, and Rivero himself recedes behind the painting. This focus not only honors his legacy, it also allows him to challenge the tendency to flatten artists of color into biographical statements. His art draws on his Afro-Dominican American identity, as well as on a religious upbringing that incorporated Catholicism, Evangelical Christianity, Vodun, Santeria and Afro-Caribbean spiritual practices. Across his work, which encompasses painting, drawing, sculpture and collage, Rivero pulls apart and reconstructs the idea of belonging. Having a nest.” For Rivero, who was born and raised in New York, “home” is a verb. “I want something clean and empty so I can go in there and make paintings without having to look at everything.
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There’s the door from his childhood apartment, his old TV from middle school, the curtains from the first place he lived on his own and a raft of fixtures reclaimed from the building where he once worked. His show at Charles Moffett gallery in Manhattan, “ Steward: The Ballad of a Super Super,” is opening soon, and his studio is packed with work, though his personal effects also crowd the walls, given the same pride of place as his paintings in progress. Lego sets share shelf space with a library of art monographs, religious texts and science-fiction novels.
A drum set and some guitars are kept in one corner of the room. On a sweltering afternoon in the thick of August, the artist Kenny Rivero, 41, opens the door to his Bronx studio.
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