Daniel Rios Rodriguez creates tactile, symbolic paintings that explore identity, memory, and place through a deeply personal lens. Rodriguez merges abstraction with raw materiality, carving, assembling, and layering found objects, nails, rope, and textured paint onto hand-shaped wooden panels. His work balances lyrical intimacy and rugged resilience, channeling the lived experiences of the Mexican American diaspora.

Recently, Rodriguez has used fire as a metaphor for transformation, survival, and sacred continuity. The virgula, a pre-Hispanic symbol of speech and flow, appears throughout, evoking communication, ancestry, and spiritual energy. His compositions conjure landscapes of feeling and myth rather than literal history, speaking to a dual identity shaped by labor, ritual, and displacement.

Rodriguez sees painting as both a devotional act and a form of resistance, saying, “[t]hey come from a need to connect with ancestry and ritual, and also from a desire to hold onto beauty in the face of chaos.” He is also committed to teaching and mentorship, working with diverse student communities across Texas.