Kenny Rivero (1981)
Jealous Cat, 2016.
Statement:
As I work through a variety of media, primarily painting, drawing, and sculpture, I often begin by contemplating the convoluted histories of New York City and the Dominican Republic. Along with the occasional reference to popular narratives and accepted notions of history, the content of my work pulls from anecdotes from my own family and the collective memory developed by the people living in these two places.
Night Baller with the Pink Laces, 2016.
Pantherman, pantherman, pantherman, 2016.
Ultimately, my aim is to deconstruct the histories and identities I have been conditioned to understand as absolute, in order to reengineer these parts into new wholes, with new functions. This process allows me to creatively explore, and come to terms with, the broken narrative of Dominican American identity, socio-geographic solidarity, familial expectations, race, and gender roles. As a result, I tend to consider the products of my practice syncretic in nature.
I can see a little bit outside, 2016.
Rivero, a Yale MFA graduate, grew up on the mean streets of Washington Heights in the 1980s, and memories of life there provide a theater where psychologically charged narratives play out. In three large paintings, It Happened on the Corner, El Pique and The Fire Next Time (all from 2014), confrontations, beatings and fires dissipate into pictorial snippets. Sidewalks are transformed into sacrificial altars, slabs on which figures are dismembered. But Rivero also employs a comic touch that blunts the impact of his images. He mixes body parts, architectural fragments, letters and numbers to create a playful confusion, complicating our relationship to urban brutality.(Time Out, 2015)