Dan Lin-Rivera

Imagine for a moment that you are an intergalactic biologist, conducting an autopsy of a living creature from another solar system analogous to our own—it squirms, screams and lashes out as you expose and explore its strange yet somehow familiar anatomy from the inside out. You feel a kinship with the creature, even as you cause it pain and it wounds you with scratches and bites. You feel oddly comforted by its presence. You sense that you’ve somehow known this being forever—that it has been here all along. This sensation of revulsion and reunion in one is the feeling evoked by the artwork of Daniel Lin-Rivera.
Rivera’s huge mixed-media paintings are abstract, yet subtly figurative, in the way that photographs of deep sea, remote space or high magnification can be simultaneously foreign and familiar, frightening and inviting. The paintings literally jut out into the room in places, breaking the barriers of their two-dimensional world to exist in yours as living, breathing entities, while Rivera’s small, intricate drawings and collage draw you into unique little ecosystems that you can endlessly visit and explore but never completely understand.
And Rivera doesn’t claim to understand it himself. When pressed for details of his process, planning or conceptual design, he prefers to let the work reveal itself to him organically. Like a medium conjuring spirits from the Other Side, Rivera thinks modestly of himself as a vessel through which his artwork is sprung upon the world.
But however they come to be, Rivera’s creations are undoubtedly here to stay. Owning a piece by Rivera must be like adopting a pet or a child, except that instead of adding just one sentient being to your household, you have invited in a whole world of creatures, in all their gory, outlandish, unapologetic detail. And you can be sure that in their company you will never be bored or lonely.

-Joan Reilly is a freelance writer, illustrator, contributing editor for Hi-Horse Comics and former co-curator for Metro971 art gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn