Kenny Rivero: Ash on Everything

Charles Moffett is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by the Bronx-based artist Kenny Rivero. The show, titled Ash on Everything, marks the first solo exhibition of the artist’s work in New York in over three years and his fifth with the gallery. In the week ahead of the opening of Ash on Everything, Charles Moffett will present a small selection of Rivero’s new paintings in a solo booth at NADA Miami on view December 2 - 6, 2025.  The gallery’s fair presentation will serve as a prelude to the larger exhibition, a glimpse into the world that Rivero’s newest paintings summon. In the years since Rivero’s last exhibition in New York, Steward: Ballad of a Super Super (2022), the artist has had solo exhibitions in cities around the world, including in London, U.K. and Los Angeles, C.A. In that time, his work has joined the permanent collections of a number of major museums, such as the Norton Museum, Palm Beach, FL; the Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; and the Modern Art Museum Fort Worth, TX, where his work was exhibited in the recent exhibition Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists Since 1940 (2024).

Rivero’s visual arts practice, which spans paintings, collage, drawings, and sculpture, explores the complexity of identity through narrative images, language, numbers, and symbolism. Born in Washington Heights to Dominican parents and now based in the Bronx, Rivero’s aim has long been to deconstruct the histories he has been raised to understand as absolute and to investigate the stories he has been told as unassailable truths about Dominican American identity, socio-geographic solidarity, familial expectations, race, and gender roles. While those pursuits to interrogate the past and the legacies it leaves behind continue to animate his practice, through his newest body of work, Rivero begins to envision a holistic, alternative world connected to yet existing beyond our own — a plane embodied by familiar but otherworldly figures engaged in struggles of resistance resonant with our time, yet energized with power, vision, and ability that stretch far past our own.

World-making is not entirely new to Rivero’s practice. Emerging from a diverse religious upbringing that incorporated Christianity, Catholicism, and Afro-Caribbean spiritual practices, Rivero’s hybrid faith and evolving beliefs in the afterlife, divination, and connection between the ancestors and the living poetically weave themselves into his work. Looking throughout Rivero’s oeuvre, we see paintings that hover between realms and compositions that visualize the incorporeal. For this body of work, Rivero has pushed himself further — each painting occupies a place or moment of connection within the artist’s newly imagined universe, a spiritual arena that ignores our rules of space and time yet retains geographic footing in the artist’s beloved New York. Rivero gives us our bearings through the brick walls, concrete sidewalks, and poster ads of the city’s streetscape, or the watch clock, thin window shades, and recreations of the fire-resistant, chain-breaking Anima Sola that adorned the rooms of his childhood. But just as we find our footing, those familiar elements give way to mysterious forces and illusive bodies of space that enshroud them.

A trained musician, Rivero brings an instinctive approach to his painting practice. Beginning a new work by applying and shifting paint on the canvas in a rhythmic fashion, he allows the different elements of the composition to improvisationally arrive in their pre-destined forms. As the artist embarked on this new body of work, he kept returning to depictions of folded notes — visible now throughout many of these paintings, tucked within a pants waistband or under a baseball mitt, aflame in the sea, dangling from a string tied to an open hand, emerging from a sliced apple. Then, in a series of trompe l'oeil style paintings, Rivero captures the notes unfolded, revealing code-inscribed pieces of paper. Those familiar with Rivero’s practice will recognize the artist’s hand, the seemingly incongruous combinations of letters and numbers that hint at a meaning, but one that can only be fully known by the artist himself. Perhaps carrying secret wishes, messages of coordination, battle plans of resistance, or unheard prayers, the indecipherable notes and their carefully folded counterparts situate each of these paintings as chapters of an untold epic, threads that weave together the fabric of the artist’s imagined universe.

Kenny Rivero (b. 1981; lives and works in New York. MFA Yale 2012, BFA SVA 2006) is a full time faculty member of the Visual Arts at Columbia University. Rivero's work is represented in notable museum and public collections including the Modern Art Museum, Forth Worth, TX; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; El Museo del Barrio, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Collection of Thomas J. Watson Library, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Mellon Foundation, New York; Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY; the Schingoethe Center Museum, Aurora, IL; and the Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art, Roswell, NM.