Rio Gilmer-Goncalves

Rio was born in New York (March 28th, 1996) and grew up in Paris, having both an Irish and a Portuguese lineage. He works across several activities such as Paintings, Design, Installations and Music. 

His artistic expression explores shapes and forms with various materials such as ink, acrylic, gouache, wood, glitter flakes, textiles, also extending to digital graphic conceptions, and presumably a lot more to come. A project calls specific materials and reversely.

His inspiration goes with my infinite curiosity. But Primitive arts, mainly African, will always remain decisive for him for their stylization, symbolization and archetypal forms. Then of course, contemporary movements from De Stijl, Surrealism and abstraction to informalism art, abstract expressionism, Pop art, Comics, Graffiti and digital creations.

In some ways, in many ways, his works reflects a vision of society in an abstract form. It is a visual expression of our multifaceted social interactions. Everyone is someone else's piece in the big picture that no one can see as a whole as if they were outside this metamorphic game. Aren't we making a puzzling puzzle all together? But whatever the relation between each-other, be it loving, friendly, professional, antagonistic, toxic or anything else, it eventually fits because it has to. We all wear many masks all along our days without knowing when we switch for one to another. We all are someone else's reflection and projection all at the same time. 

And it keeps changing like the ocean. Meanwhile mirrors always lie. His works is a constant endeavor to express symbolically this never ending flow of individuals dealing together through graphic series in which all the matching pieces reflect our meaningful chaos.