{"id":19879,"date":"2026-01-06T22:47:36","date_gmt":"2026-01-06T22:47:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2026\/01\/06\/kenny-riveros-ash-on-everything-frames-crisis-as-ritual-and-renewal\/"},"modified":"2026-01-06T22:47:39","modified_gmt":"2026-01-06T22:47:39","slug":"kenny-riveros-ash-on-everything-frames-crisis-as-ritual-and-renewal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2026\/01\/06\/kenny-riveros-ash-on-everything-frames-crisis-as-ritual-and-renewal\/","title":{"rendered":"Kenny Rivero\u2019s \u201cAsh on Everything\u201d Frames Crisis as Ritual and Renewal"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Works by Kenny Rivero\u2019s \u201cAsh on Everything\u201d at Charles Moffett in New York. Photo by Zeshan Ahmed, courtesy of Charles Moffett<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A continuous interplay between the physical, psychological and spiritual dimensions of reality defines the paintings of American Dominican artist Kenny Rivero<\/a>. This symbolic layering is especially vivid in the new works featured in his latest exhibition, \u201cAsh on Everything<\/a>,\u201d on view at Charles Moffett, New York, through January 24. His first New York show in over three years, the presentation reveals a clear evolution in Rivero\u2019s practice\u2014both technically and conceptually. These works reflect a heightened awareness of the universal resonance his subject matter can evoke, alongside a growing confidence in translating his expansive mythopoetic world onto canvas.<\/p>\n

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A new material richness matches the densely layered cultural references in these works. Rivero adopts a looser approach to painting, experimenting with varied techniques and incorporating real-world elements. The result is a collage of lived experiences interwoven with internal, psychological and spiritual realms\u2014a complex orchestration that invites a more soulful reading of the world.<\/p>\n

About fifteen years ago, Rivero was working almost entirely in collage before shifting to more traditional approaches on canvas. \u201cThis time, especially with the notes, I wanted something more real\u2014materials that were older, archival, things I had collected,\u201d he tells Observer. \u201cObjects that had an aura, that carried energy, that had lived in my studio and accumulated stories.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Kenny Rivero in his studio. Photo by Daniel Greer, courtesy Charles Moffett<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Yet his approach to oil painting is intensely tactile and physical, with passages where thick paint becomes strikingly plastic\u2014an element unto itself\u2014and others where the artist\u2019s hand is visibly present in direct, gestural marks on the canvas. \u201cI want the painting to feel like it was made by a hand,\u201d he clarifies. \u201cTo make that presence undeniable. That\u2019s really important to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

His work has long drawn from personal experience, shaped by his upbringing in Washington Heights as the child of Dominican parents and the daily challenges of diasporic life\u2014an experience he has consistently sought to deconstruct and process through painting. In this new body of work, however, Rivero delves even further into the past, transmuting personal memories and traumas into a more universal epic that links the everyday struggles of urban existence to realms beyond the limits of time-bound physical reality.<\/p>\n

In these paintings, time collapses\u2014past, present and future blur and coexist, reaching toward something eternal. \u201cIt\u2019s not nostalgia. It\u2019s reframing time to reveal something universal about the human condition,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019m building a fiction. I\u2019m telling a story, but it\u2019s not necessarily my story.\u201d While his earlier work was deeply autobiographical, this body marks a shift. \u201cIt still relates to me in the sense that it draws from my experience of being in New York and being Dominican, but the story takes place outside of me and has nothing to do with my childhood, my personal history, or my family. It\u2019s an entirely new story, one that exists beyond me, and that feels very new for my work.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Rivero reveals, it was only in the past few months that he was able to recognize the narrative taking shape across the paintings fully. \u201cAbout two months ago is when I really started to see where the paintings were going\u2014where the images would ultimately land and where the story was beginning to form. Up until then, everything was coming out of the process itself: thinking about color, and really wanting to focus on the figure more than I had before.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Kenny Rivero, Shadow Mirror<\/em>, 2025. Photo by Daniel Greer, courtesy Charles Moffett<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Rivero\u2019s process is, in fact, deeply intuitive. By surrendering to it, he can channel and translate symbolic narratives onto the canvas\u2014narratives that precede language or rational frameworks. A self-taught artist who moved from working as a night doorman and Zwirner custodian to selling out at major art fairs, Rivero has developed and preserved an original symbolic lexicon that remains untouched by trends or the conventions of traditional figurative painting.<\/p>\n

For this reason, his characters often appear cartoonish or seemingly na\u00efve\u2014qualities that gradually reveal themselves as hauntingly symbolic and archetypal. These ghostly, hybrid figures\u2014part human, part monster\u2014emerge like spirits from another realm, attempting to communicate something just beyond reach. \u201cThey\u2019re inspired by very specific people emerging from the past, but they\u2019re not autobiographical\u2014they are much more universal,\u201d Rivero explains. \u201cWith this body of work, I\u2019m starting to develop specific characters: they have identities, they function more like types and archetypes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rivero\u2019s characters are, in this sense, closer to the Latin concept of character or maschera<\/i>: figures that represent human types rather than individual portraits. They operate less as autobiographical stand-ins than as constructed roles\u2014embodiments of shared conditions, gestures and psychic states. Each carries an identity, but one that is symbolic rather than personal, shaped by collective experience rather than private memory.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe characters support each other within the world I\u2019m building. They function almost like a team. They\u2019re on a mission together, trying to help one another in trying to communicate something,\u201d Rivero reflects.<\/p>\n

From this early part of our conversation, it becomes clear that these new works take up the human journey from a broader, more universal perspective: a shared search for meaning, especially within political, economic and social systems that are far larger than the individual and often alienate us from what is essential, primal and rooted in being\u2014in the world, and in time.<\/p>\n

Spiritual content has always coursed through Rivero\u2019s work, shaped by a religious upbringing that fused Christianity, Catholicism and Afro-Caribbean spiritual practices. This hybrid foundation enabled him to form an idiosyncratic symbolic language that finds full expression in his work, allowing for a syncretic exploration of belief systems and their shared understandings of the afterlife, divination and ancestral connection. While his ghostly, often faceless figures most clearly reference Santer\u00eda and Afro-Caribbean traditions, Christian iconographies\u2014particularly those related to saints\u2014are subtly interwoven into the painterly narrative, as seen in No Ice (Sin Yellow)<\/i>, 2025.<\/p>\n

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Kenny Rivero, Navigator<\/em>, 2025. Photo by Daniel Greer, courtesy Charles Moffett<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

At the same time, elements of popular culture and urban vernacular are seamlessly woven into the work, suggesting how the spiritual and mythological can coexist within the concrete framework of a metropolis like New York. The brick walls of public housing, concrete sidewalks, the city\u2019s streetscape and the silhouettes of chimney-lined industrial plants appear alongside symbols drawn from Afro-Caribbean daily rituals, as seen in cryptic yet evocative works like Shadow Mirror<\/i> (2025). Together, these elements reflect Rivero\u2019s ongoing exercise in world-building\u2014something he says he\u2019s practiced since childhood, even within the material and spiritual constraints of life in Washington Heights.<\/p>\n

Yet even the most mundane, terrestrial forms are charged with symbolic meaning. Light bulbs, for example, recur across multiple works. \u201cThere\u2019s the literal idea of power\u2014electricity\u2014and how unstable access to power can be in the Caribbean. But there\u2019s also power in a more abstract, spiritual sense. In some paintings, like the mirror painting, power isn\u2019t about electricity at all. The power the light bulbs are losing isn\u2019t electrical\u2014it\u2019s spiritual. They\u2019re meant to illuminate the figure in a different way.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Navigator<\/i> (2025), the light bulbs activate another way of seeing\u2014one that opens onto a parallel reality imagined or envisioned by the figures and projected across the room in Sub Maintenance (red shadow)<\/i> (2025). Together, the two paintings set in motion a network of symbolic correspondences that intensify their luminous, metaphysical charge.<\/p>\n

Every element that appears in Rivero\u2019s paintings is tied to a place he has known. \u201cGrowing up in Washington Heights, there were abandoned buildings we used to play in as kids. In the Dominican Republic, too\u2014empty houses we\u2019d use for different things,\u201d he recalls. \u201cThat\u2019s where I learned to build worlds, and to understand the relationship between reality and fantasy. Those spaces were open to interpretation and reimagination.\u201d<\/p>\n

Imagination, through this exercise in world-building, offered Rivero a kind of sanctuary\u2014a way to step outside the boundaries of childhood reality. Painting allowed him to continue that practice. \u201cIn the paintings, time collapses\u2014past, present, and future exist together. It\u2019s not nostalgia. It\u2019s reframing time to reveal something universal about the human condition,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n

Even the most cheerful, cartoonish elements borrowed from popular culture\u2014particularly Caribbean culture, with its bright colors and kinetic energy\u2014are tempered by a darker undercurrent and spiritual weight. \u201cThere\u2019s always that darker side. Crisis, trauma\u2014whether that trauma is colonial, or more contemporary, tied to nature, to hurricanes, to environmental conditions,\u201d Rivero notes, pointing to the recurring airplanes, bombs and explosions that course through his compositions.<\/p>\n

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Kenny Rivero, Sub Maintenance (red shadow)<\/em>, 2025. Photo by Daniel Greer, courtesy Charles Moffett<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A sense of ongoing emergency unfolds across the works. \u201cEveryone depicted in these paintings is functioning within a crisis\u2014some kind of post-apocalyptic situation, or at least a moment of urgency,\u201d Rivero confirms. \u201cThey\u2019re trying to communicate with each other in secret, and that\u2019s where the notes come in.\u201d<\/p>\n

In this exhibition, he elevates that interweaving into a layered meta-narrative. Small notes are embedded within larger compositions\u2014tucked into waistbands, hidden under baseball mitts, set aflame at sea or emerging from sliced apples. In a series of trompe l\u2019oeil-style paintings, these notes are then unfolded, revealing coded messages that read like survival instructions, drawing on ancestral knowledge shaped by generations of physical and psychological struggle.<\/p>\n

This structure invites a deeper form of viewer engagement. The audience is called to follow the story\u2019s thread, piecing together fragments that connect across the works. \u201cI want the viewer to begin unpacking the story,\u201d he explains. \u201cMy hope is that viewers will spend time with the paintings, sit with them, and start to understand how they speak to one another.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Rivero embraces the inherent openness and ambiguity of painting\u2014and acknowledges that no single interpretation can be definitive\u2014he suggests that meaning arises through the relationships between works. The narrative unfolds less through decoding fixed symbols than through attunement to subtle clues and a willingness to engage in shared resonance. That painting, he says, sets everything up: \u201cIt establishes how to read the symbols in the show and defines the space in which everything is happening. The story then builds toward an ending that feels like an explosion. That\u2019s what the bomb represents for me\u2014not just destruction, but renewal. It\u2019s about imagining how to build the next world.\u201d<\/p>\n

The works on view gesture toward a truth that transcends individual experience and everyday crisis. They offer a glimpse into a broader, more universal perspective\u2014one that exceeds linear time and reconnects with something essential about human life as part of a larger whole. Here, the canvas becomes a portal\u2014an access point into other symbolic systems and dimensions. His paintings function as devices that open onto spiritual and ancestral planes, where a primal sense of truth can be rediscovered beyond the constructs of contemporary life. They are at once instruments of healing, resistance against cultural erasure and acts of reconnection with the ancestral.<\/p>\n

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Kenny Rivero, Morning Shift<\/em>, 2025. Photo by Daniel Greer, courtesy Charles Moffett<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Like contemporary parables of the human condition, Rivero\u2019s figures inhabit a metaphorical realm\u2014an in-between dimension that acts less as illustration and more as a threshold. This symbolic field enables personal experiences to expand into shared understanding, giving form to what is hidden, repressed or difficult to articulate. The sequencing of works in the exhibition is intentional. Once they came together, Rivero could perceive the narrative they collectively revealed. The journey\u2014through birth, coming of age, loss, decay and renewal\u2014begins with a large painting of a sidewalk and a woman on fire, and concludes with a monumental image of a coconut bomb on the verge of explosion, bringing this mythic epic to a close.<\/p>\n

Echoing Victor Turner<\/a>, the liminal terrain these images occupy is marked by instability, transformation and ritual crisis: a \u201cbetwixt and between\u201d phase essential to rites of passage, in which individuals are stripped of former identities and communal roles, without yet having assumed new ones. Yet it is precisely this in-betweenness that enables Rivero\u2019s figures to exist not fully in one world or another, but suspended between collapse and renewal, destruction and possibility.<\/p>\n

In building his own urban mythology, Rivero charts this transitional space as one of potential rather than resolution. Fire, explosions, coded messages and fractured architectures serve as signs of passage, not finality\u2014staging a collective crossing through a moment of historical uncertainty. Within this symbolic framework, the coconut emerges as a central anchor. Rooted in Afro-Caribbean cosmologies and divinatory practices, it is closely tied to If\u00e1, the spiritual system Rivero follows. In that tradition, the coconut is used to seek guidance from ancestors and spirits\u2014but only through the act of breaking. For Rivero, that gesture encapsulates the exhibition\u2019s core logic: transformation, knowledge and renewal arise not through preservation, but through rupture. As Mircea Eliade<\/a> suggests, here destruction is not simply an end, but a necessary act through which meaning is restored and renewed.<\/p>\n

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The show is the first solo exhibition of the artist\u2019s work in New York in over three years and his fifth with the gallery. Photo by Zeshan Ahmed, courtesy of Charles Moffett<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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\t\t\t\t\"Kenny<\/p><\/div>\n