Artist Kenny Rivero in his Starr Street studio. — Photo courtesy of the artist

Working out of his apartment on Starr Street, artist Kenny Rivero rolls Santería, numerology, baseball heros, X-men comics, and Nas lyrics into a conscientiously bastardized, airtight spirituality of his own invention. Born to immigrant parents from the Dominican Republic, but raised reading Frank Miller comics and playing baseball in New York’s Washington Heights, Rivero incorporates visual elements from the cultures of both places into allegorical works that function as icons for a magical thinking of his own invention.

	Gauntlet by Kenny Rivero. Click for more.

With a sister who reads coffee cups and an aunt who reads tarot cards, mysticism was a reality to Rivero growing up, and figures highly into his work. In The Water by My House, while alphanumeric glyphs function formally as abstract compositional elements, Rivero explains that their inclusion is anything but accidental, and has to do with Numerology. “Numbers are a big deal in the Dominican Republic. They are 100% real.” The piece, which has a large blue ground, personifies the Hudson river as the deity Oshun receiving offerings.

In a related performance piece, Rivero envisions hitting baseballs across the river, from the base of the GW bridge into Weehawken, where baseball was first played. Knowing the balls will never reach baseball’s holy birthplace, they become offerings for the river. A believer and a distanced observer at once, Rivero is conscientious of his double perspective, creating hybrid forms from it. “My work is fantastical, an exaggerated version of something I’ve experienced. I want my work to speak about New York. It’s an immigrant land, changing every day… I want to depict relationships between people and where they live.”

A series of intricate drawings entertain what super hero-like warriors from Washington Heights might look like if the neighborhood, after a natural disaster, began to drift off the island of Manhattan. “I’m commenting on the idea that people in poor neighborhoods isolate themselves to the point where they create small worlds because they never leave. So their neighborhoods become ‘the world.’” The delicate drawings make up a set of armored characters dressed in a mix of ancient tribal accoutrement, neo-geo patterns, and baseball insignia.

His drawings, which owe a light tribute to the dark, childlike drawings of Henry Darger are (like his paintings) colorful depictions of fantasy, personal experiences and wish fulfillment. He explains each one to me matter-of-factly as an experienced iconographer would do in front of a Byzantine icon, elucidating the content that each formal element stands for. The letter “A,” Rivero’s late father’s first initial, is ubiquitous, hovering as a potent tribute in many of his drawings, while the appearance of a protective arm gauntlet, which contain references to his childhood hero Wolverine, is reoccurring in many of his drawings. One imaginary gauntlet uses the letters of a girls name in a dainty decorative pattern of pink, blue and orange. Rivero tells me he had designed this in the hopes that if he wore it, his crush would reciprocate his feelings.

Up on his wall, The King Did Not Hang is a large and brooding portrait of a jeweled figure that relates to the a Santería (often practiced in the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Haiti [as voodoo]) myth. Among the Yoruba the words Oba ko so refer to a legend that Shango, the fourth king of the city-state Oyo, was defeated in battle and in shame left the city to hang himself. Members of the king’s cult in Africa deny this. Thunder, for them is a sign of Shango manifesting his power and whenever it thunders they say "Oba ko so" — the king did not hang.

Rivero’s King is painted in a flat, round style and crowned with pieces of painted scrap wood that Rivero has cut into geometric shapes and obsessively layed into the composition. The naïve style of the figure, the abstracted background and the collaged texture recalls Romare Bearden (“I pull a lot from him, there’s no shame,” Rivero happily admits), while the palate of bright colors against shades of brown, and quotes of line hatching strike the coordinated pell-mell aesthetic achieved by artists considered part of the California/NY skate culture-influenced “Beautiful Losers” group. Yet his works have a look of their own; Rivero builds up each painting like a sculpture, scoring the canvas with stitches, scrap wood, and small objects he finds in the streets.

For eight years, Rivero worked as a doorman on 21st Street. He would poach from the trash, integrating those materials into his paintings. “My boss came to see one of my art shows and he recognized all of his garbage.” Rivero had always drawn obsessively, but he didn’t think that he could have made a career from it. He was going to be an accountant (he studied at BMCC and Brooklyn College briefly) but after finding a stack of exhibition catalogues from Marlborough Gallery, Rivero realized he wanted the freedom to make art as a vocation. He has now just recently graduated from the School of Visual Arts, and he is currently working at the Chelsea-based David Zwirner Gallery, as a janitor.

He takes pride in his work and lets it influence his art. “Working there has influenced me; I mop the floors in the same way that I paint. I want to do a series on dirt and cleanliness… I’d like to do a performance piece where I sweep the length of Manhattan in one line.” On the other hand, Zwirner’s roster of artists have also been a major influence on his work.

The influence of Chris Ofili can be seen in paintings like Wealthier Girls, which was at Rivero’s studio when I visited. It is somber, painted in deep blues and blacks, with glimpses of color. Rivero pulled out an exhibition catalogue from the most recent solo show Ofili had at the gallery, and pointed to a photo of an oil painting composed mostly in different gradients of black and blue (Lover’s rock, guilt, 2007). “I wanted to make a really dark piece like this,” he explains. More than an homage, however, Rivero’s painting is a biting social commentary. In it, two figures, so dark they are almost imperceptible at certain angles, are meant to represent a pair of Dominican girls getting dressed to go out during one of the frequent blackouts that occurs on the island. The title refers to Dominican ladies trying to make themselves look richer, (and therefore not from the island) by wearing fancy or American brands. In Wealthier Girls, Rivero paints the disillusionment and vanity of their aspirations by showing us how little they can truly can see of themselves. Rivero says, “They create the appearance of wealth through material means to assume a predominant status, sacrifice their cultural identity, and in turn, diminish their perception of themselves.” At the same time, he is also commenting on how those who cannot afford generators are at the mercy of the Republic’s faulty state-owned power grids.

Rivero has shown at GoFish Gallery, I-20, Dalida Vasquez Space, both in New York and internationally. He was an artist in residence at PS122 Gallery in 2008, where he also had a solo show. This summer, he will be included in “Octet,” a show at the Pera Museum in Istanbul.