![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgE7wWPMJ1eZhX_AeMQKRw3mEIJQMxlDf4aNjuao8CXAybGUGoqcMLJmgmSU1OVZphF8BYQOkiH3MEqJHSsiCNhK14pKtO8n_3DJQ_XsSPSsFdo9MjcSNYz0_kFpA-b_7bhmwM2kftMWW3y/s640/Daniel+Rios+Rodriguez+at+Lulu.jpg)
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The crust laden and the spiritual, it's hard to do sentimentality in art without being an outsider. You can't paint a flower without ironizing its loveliness, your desire to impress this. Sentimentality drips into its performance, theatrical, a too-much-presence and we blush for the artist having fallen into the trap of their own subjectivity for them, too often. Thick paint helps. It alleviates with its own paintertly over-presence, which provides, if not an ironizing, at least a solidarity. The paint expresses materially the same excess as the subject is. Confidence in clumsiness, endlessly endearing, a situation where you'll want to care for them.
See too: James Lee Byars at VeneKlasen/Werner