Elisa Carollo
2026-01-06 21:51:00
A continuous interplay between the physical, psychological and spiritual dimensions of reality defines the paintings of American Dominican artist Kenny Rivero. This symbolic layering is especially vivid in the new works featured in his latest exhibition, “Ash on Everything,” 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’s practice—both 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.
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—a complex orchestration that invites a more soulful reading of the world.
About fifteen years ago, Rivero was working almost entirely in collage before shifting to more traditional approaches on canvas. “This time, especially with the notes, I wanted something more real—materials that were older, archival, things I had collected,” he tells Observer. “Objects that had an aura, that carried energy, that had lived in my studio and accumulated stories.”
Yet his approach to oil painting is intensely tactile and physical, with passages where thick paint becomes strikingly plastic—an element unto itself—and others where the artist’s hand is visibly present in direct, gestural marks on the canvas. “I want the painting to feel like it was made by a hand,” he clarifies. “To make that presence undeniable. That’s really important to me.”
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—an 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.
In these paintings, time collapses—past, present and future blur and coexist, reaching toward something eternal. “It’s not nostalgia. It’s reframing time to reveal something universal about the human condition,” he says. “I’m building a fiction. I’m telling a story, but it’s not necessarily my story.” While his earlier work was deeply autobiographical, this body marks a shift. “It 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’s an entirely new story, one that exists beyond me, and that feels very new for my work.”
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. “About two months ago is when I really started to see where the paintings were going—where 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.”
Rivero’s process is, in fact, deeply intuitive. By surrendering to it, he can channel and translate symbolic narratives onto the canvas—narratives that precede language or rational frameworks. As an artist who moved from working as a night doorman and Zwirner custodian to graduating from Yale and selling out at major art fairs, Rivero has always preserved an original symbolic lexicon that remains untouched by trends or the conventions of traditional figurative painting.
For this reason, his characters often appear cartoonish or seemingly naïve—qualities that gradually reveal themselves as hauntingly symbolic and archetypal. These ghostly, hybrid figures—part human, part monster—emerge like spirits from another realm, attempting to communicate something just beyond reach. “They’re inspired by very specific people emerging from the past, but they’re not autobiographical—they are much more universal,” Rivero explains. “With this body of work, I’m starting to develop specific characters: they have identities, they function more like types and archetypes.”
Rivero’s characters are, in this sense, closer to the Latin concept of character or maschera: figures that represent human types rather than individual portraits. They operate less as autobiographical stand-ins than as constructed roles—embodiments 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.
“The characters support each other within the world I’m building. They function almost like a team. They’re on a mission together, trying to help one another in trying to communicate something,” Rivero reflects.
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—in the world, and in time.
Spiritual content has always coursed through Rivero’s 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 Santería and Afro-Caribbean traditions, Christian iconographies—particularly those related to saints—are subtly interwoven into the painterly narrative, as seen in No Ice (Sin Yellow), 2025.
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’s 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 (2025). Together, these elements reflect Rivero’s ongoing exercise in world-building—something he says he’s practiced since childhood, even within the material and spiritual constraints of life in Washington Heights.
Yet even the most mundane, terrestrial forms are charged with symbolic meaning. Light bulbs, for example, recur across multiple works. “There’s the literal idea of power—electricity—and how unstable access to power can be in the Caribbean. But there’s also power in a more abstract, spiritual sense. In some paintings, like the mirror painting, power isn’t about electricity at all. The power the light bulbs are losing isn’t electrical—it’s spiritual. They’re meant to illuminate the figure in a different way.”
In Navigator (2025), the light bulbs activate another way of seeing—one that opens onto a parallel reality imagined or envisioned by the figures and projected across the room in Sub Maintenance (red shadow) (2025). Together, the two paintings set in motion a network of symbolic correspondences that intensify their luminous, metaphysical charge.
Every element that appears in Rivero’s paintings is tied to a place he has known. “Growing up in Washington Heights, there were abandoned buildings we used to play in as kids. In the Dominican Republic, too—empty houses we’d use for different things,” he recalls. “That’s where I learned to build worlds, and to understand the relationship between reality and fantasy. Those spaces were open to interpretation and reimagination.”
Imagination, through this exercise in world-building, offered Rivero a kind of sanctuary—a way to step outside the boundaries of childhood reality. Painting allowed him to continue that practice. “In the paintings, time collapses—past, present, and future exist together. It’s not nostalgia. It’s reframing time to reveal something universal about the human condition,” he adds.
Even the most cheerful, cartoonish elements borrowed from popular culture—particularly Caribbean culture, with its bright colors and kinetic energy—are tempered by a darker undercurrent and spiritual weight. “There’s always that darker side. Crisis, trauma—whether that trauma is colonial, or more contemporary, tied to nature, to hurricanes, to environmental conditions,” Rivero notes, pointing to the recurring airplanes, bombs and explosions that course through his compositions.
A sense of ongoing emergency unfolds across the works. “Everyone depicted in these paintings is functioning within a crisis—some kind of post-apocalyptic situation, or at least a moment of urgency,” Rivero confirms. “They’re trying to communicate with each other in secret, and that’s where the notes come in.”
In this exhibition, he elevates that interweaving into a layered meta-narrative. Small notes are embedded within larger compositions—tucked into waistbands, hidden under baseball mitts, set aflame at sea or emerging from sliced apples. In a series of trompe l’oeil-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.
This structure invites a deeper form of viewer engagement. The audience is called to follow the story’s thread, piecing together fragments that connect across the works. “I want the viewer to begin unpacking the story,” he explains. “My hope is that viewers will spend time with the paintings, sit with them, and start to understand how they speak to one another.”
While Rivero embraces the inherent openness and ambiguity of painting—and acknowledges that no single interpretation can be definitive—he 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 No Ice (Sin yellow) 2025, he says, sets everything up: “It 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’s what the bomb represents for me—not just destruction, but renewal. It’s about imagining how to build the next world.”
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—one that exceeds linear time and reconnects with something essential about human life as part of a larger whole. Here, the canvas becomes a portal—an 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.
Like contemporary parables of the human condition, Rivero’s figures inhabit a metaphorical realm—an 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—through birth, coming of age, loss, decay and renewal—begins 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.
Echoing Victor Turner, the liminal terrain these images occupy is marked by instability, transformation and ritual crisis: a “betwixt and between” 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’s figures to exist not fully in one world or another, but suspended between collapse and renewal, destruction and possibility.
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—staging 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 Ifá, the spiritual system Rivero follows. In that tradition, the coconut is used to seek guidance from ancestors and spirits—but only through the act of breaking. For Rivero, that gesture encapsulates the exhibition’s core logic: transformation, knowledge and renewal arise not through preservation, but through rupture. As Mircea Eliade suggests, here destruction is not simply an end, but a necessary act through which meaning is restored and renewed.
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