Wuilkar Ríos (1955), is a Venezuelan artist who graduated in Education from the Universidad Nacional Abierta, with studies in arts at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Aplicadas Carmelo Fernández, in Venezuela, respectively; and studies in marble sculpture, drawing and design at the L’Istituto Professionale per l’Industria e l’Artigianato del Marmo “Pietro Tacca”, Carrara, Italy.

His aesthetic references are extensive, since Ríos is an admirer of many artists, among whom we can mention Goya, Francis Bacon, Alberto Giacometti, Chaim Soutine, Graham Sutherland, Jacobo Borges, Alirio Palacios, among others, references from which he has built a visual discourse, within the new figuration, artistic trend that deals with the human figure, its central theme, in an informal and expressionist way, from the perspective of the grotesque as a form of social and political denunciation, and as an expression of feelings of existential anguish, experienced by the human being as an individual.

Although this current emerged in Europe in the mid-twentieth century, Bacon being its greatest representative, around the 1960s it took root fundamentally in Latin American countries such as Argentina, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela, countries where, curiously, the term “new figuration” was coined, current in which in Venezuela the painters Jacobo Borges and Alirio Palacios turned out to be the most influential on the new generations of artists.

In Ríos’s work, as we said before, these influences can be seen, but with his own style. In his painting he emphasizes the human figure, which sometimes stands out completely, and on other occasions he only conceives parts of the body; for example, in some compositions he highlights a face and in others, just hands or feet. His aesthetic approach, as he says, has to do with human’s anguish, a product of the environment in which they live.

His works are characterized by an unfinished, deformed figuration, built with expressive, gestural, fluid strokes, lines, and stains, with an accentuated, pasty texture, and the use of black and gray colors in some cases, and live, explosive, in others.

José Gregorio Noroño