Directly following Merlin James at the Kerlin Gallery Dublin, Daniel Rios Rodriguez comes across as a bit of a Jamesite. And it’s not just the insider-outsider-insider blood and guts intestinal surgery towards a transparency to make painting less of a noun and more of a ramshackle verb. No. It’s something to do with the bits and pieces — paint or otherwise — that could make up a painting.

Merlin James is more of a how-to-make-or-break-a-painting painter. His paintings are physically awkward. They twist as objects — what the Greeks called contrapposto — and subjects — what we might call ‘intellectually coy’. Merlin James is a critical painter, one who is acutely aware of the narratives (insider to outsider; Alex Katz to Forrest Bess) of hammering a painting together with a brain. His paintings literally buckle and twist under the weight of history. They are history paintings, both as subject and object, uncannily knock-knock knocking on the door of the present, or at least poke-poke poking through a badly made Duchampian peephole. In a Merlin James the ur-history of painting and the history of a painting is turned inside-out and upside-down to show the seams and threads of the inner workings of a painting. His paintings sing both the A-side and b-side of art history, the inner and outer circles of a vinyl constellation that skips and scratches with a broken needle. Painters, after all, are bad musicians; they play air guitar with the hope that one day it will make a sound to emote the thing that was missing in the first place: feeling.

Contra-Merlin James, Daniel Rios Rodriguez is a feeler, and he wants you to feel him and feel with him (he says so in the press release). It’s a strange but good thing to read, a painter admitting to such a thing as feelings in the context of this cold penthouse of commercialism in Dublin City. We might not believe it standing here among these hot paintings and red dots in the cold light of the gallery, but I do. I don’t think Merlin James would ever refer to himself as a lizard hiding under his studio rock from the baking sun mechanics of display and desire to buy and sell paintings in the gallery. Daniel Rios Rodriguez does, metaphorically.

There is something to that, isn’t there? Mystical metaphor as a way to relay feelings both inside the text and on the paintings, as if to come out from under the rock fully naked, tail and all, the cold-blooded painter would end up getting burnt by the world. In this context not many artists would admit to why they come out from under their studio rock. Daniel Rios Rodriguez does: “But I must come out. I must eat. I must live.” The verb of painting in the studio always becomes a noun in the world. Perhaps that is why all artists come out from under their rocks, if living and eating is a real possibility.

Daniel Rios Rodriguez, Sonidera de Sueños, 2020-21, Flashe, oil, nails, rope, copper, wood on canvas, 232.4 × 154.9 cm — Daniel Rios Rodriguez, *Sonidera de Sueños*, 2020-21, Flashe, oil, nails, rope, copper, wood on canvas, 232.4 × 154.9 cm

Before being informed that these paintings are loosely exorcised from dreams, we are met by the physicality of these things in the gallery. One painting sets the stage as you clear the stairs into the gallery. Standing on the floor, a bulky frame, resembling a bed headboard found in some woodland lodge retreat in the Americas (maybe Twin Peaks’ Great Northern Hotel where strange dreams are made stranger) makes its presence felt as both a linchpin and centrifugal point from which Daniel Rios Rodriguez’s paintings dream outward. This painting holds the exhibition together and itself together, composed as it is of a plexus of snakes. It helps to pinion the metaphysical subject and object of dreams that traverse the walls. It makes a horizon of paintings into a home of paintings. Manifest and distinct from the paper text in the gallery, the paintings are nouns in terms of how Daniel Rios Rodriguez’s closes the circle of his paintings with a succession of framing devices: frame, rope, copper wire, buttons or paint itself. These paintings are folk quilts held by buttons and nails that, in Freud’s dream-work is called condensation, when images come together in an unconscious layering and doubling like the radio station tuned into two stations at once. They vibrate with reference, like the spiralling red rectangular snake that hovers on a hidden sheet of green and duvet of white as if Jasper Johns’ American flag painting had come alive. The American Dream becomes a serpent.

Relayed in the artist’s words, you get a sense from the press release that Daniel Rios Rodriguez doesn’t want to be misunderstood but also doesn’t want to come out fully from the shade of his studio rock to the feeling viewer. Even though his words and paintings are hidden beneath mystical metaphor, it is realism on both the paper and the paintings that comes through (combs true) in the gallery. When he writes about being aware of his kids’ dreams, combined with the necessary needs of eating and living, we, as viewers, have to contend with not only the dreams of the artist bent on desire, but also on the context that shapes them. What did Freud say about the father? Their job above all else is to protect. Love could even be secondary to protection in the father-child relationship, or love is just protection in disguise.

Whereas Merlin James pokes holes in wholeness, Daniel Rios Rodriguez finishes the circle. Neither one is better than the other, they are just different experiences, metaphor vs metonymy. Daniel Rios Rodriguez paintings are gestalt galaxies unto themselves, containing everything if you are willing and able to dream beyond the silhouettes and framing that wrap them tight in a protective blanket. To eat. To live.

—James Merrigan

Through 20 November.