Kenny Rivero Posthumously Speaking: Dear Dear Summer Some Are

Morán Morán is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings and drawings by New York-based artist Kenny Rivero. Posthumously Speaking: Dear Dear Summer Some Are marks the first presentation of the artist’s work with Morán Morán in Los Angeles and his second solo exhibition with the gallery. Rivero’s visual arts practice, which spans paintings, collage, drawings, and sculpture, explores the complexity of identity through narrative images, language, and symbolism. Born and raised in Washington Heights to Dominican parents, Rivero is based in the Bronx, NY.

For this exhibition, Rivero presents a series of 13 paintings and 4 drawings. Completed over the course of 2024, the paintings feature a glimpse into a year in fear and mourning. In the work Camera Body (In The Wake of a Photographer’s Fetish), the heavy-lidded subject dons a third eye whose vision is being seized by the partially-hidden figure clasping and drawing blood from his neck. In Midsummer Day’s Lurk, Rivero locates an interaction between the shadow of a man being cast from a flower who is hiding from a lurking figure embedded in the bricks of a building, both unaware of a third infant spirit vigilantly observing them both. In a scattering of 12 collaged white butterflies, a reference to departed souls, I’ll Take My Picture depicts the artist’s hand tethered to the hand of a dead child. The cord attaching the two features a small flame that will eventually sever the connection. Atop the flame, a small puff of smoke opens its eyes and awakens into sentience. In the corner of the painting and far off in the distance in the picture plane, a photographer with a set of multicolored nails unsuspectedly captures the moment.

As a moment of relief and levity, a group of ancestors hold Announcements before the start of an important meeting, perhaps to discuss an upcoming potluck or signups for the upcoming softball league. Moving through loss, Rivero has chosen to lean in and submit to the grief and reject feigning resilience as a solution towards power, choosing instead to regain strength by remaining vulnerable.

While these paintings are geographically and visually located in New York City, they also employ Rivero’s personal visual vocabulary and his interest in family history, spirituality, life and death. Twenty Four Cuts, a reference to barber shop posters – traditionally used as charts for selecting hair styles through a number system – include symbols such as hovering watchful spirits and third eyes aflame. These painted homages to grief comprise the artist’s personal painterly language. However coded and cryptic they may seem, these works know to whom they are speaking. Their quiet should not be confused for silence.