A dwarf rants and romps in the middle of the painting. Lunging artistically he threatens his opponent. His left hand is raised as if engaged in a fencing bout equipped with the wrong devices. The tips of the hand’s fingers form an animal’s head that could be casting the silhouette of a hare in a shadow play. The dwarf’s costume is extravagant. Surrounding him is a fantastic landscape of bright green hills and the profile of a red tree that might have originated in a valuable piece of Chinese porcelain. To the scoundrel’s left a fantastic creature – something between a bird and a fish – explodes out of an egg and shoots upwards into the yellow sky causing luminous slivers to burst apart, reminiscent of a scene from a Surrealist tale by Boris Vian or a psychedelic fairy tale from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.

The figures of Carlos de los Ríos (b. 1974 in Santafe de Bogota, Columbia) are imaginary creatures, beholden to the tradition of allegory. The meaning of the original Greek word “allegoria,” is to speak figuratively. Psychological phenomena and apparitions are placed in de los Rios’ paintings as forms of force, uncertainty, fear and diffuse threats. The artist combines the irritating creatures he depicts with the conscious application of a two dimensional, quick and colorful manner of painting, whose expressivity displays its strength to the advantage of pure illusion.

The artist was confronted with violence early in life in his native country. This led to an intense examination of the question of the representation of violence in his art. Artistic role models include the Spanish painter, Francisco Goya, who, with his famous Caprichos etchings, demonstrated how reality is transformed through the filter of the phantasmagoric in order to encounter what lies beneath. Carlos de los Ríos does not shrink from the complexity of contradiction in his paintings. The uncertainty, which arises in the viewer when confronting his works, also demonstrates that, amidst excessive media palaver concerning psychological sensitivities, we have long since forgotten how to speak about real profoundness.