de boer (Los Angeles) is pleased to present Tan Solo un Rumor de Fondo (Just a Background Murmur), an exhibition of new paintings by Costa Rica-born, Mexico City-based artist Melissa Ríos, her first solo in Los Angeles. The exhibition brings together new paintings that probe the moment when subjectivity loosens its dependence on external frameworks of recognition, expectation, or gaze. 

Ríos’ paintings operate within a non-linear pictorial logic. Time, place, and spatial orientation are deliberately destabilized, producing compositions in which the foreground and background continuously exchange roles. The compositions appear abstract and non-linear, with structural interruptions that propose vision as something provisional. Recurring motifs with birds, butterflies, flowers, and disembodied anatomical elements circulate across the canvases, not as symbols to be decoded but as carriers of affect.

The repetition creates a visual rhythm that resists narrative closure, allowing each painting to register as a field of sensation. The works hold open a space in which meaning flickers, recedes, and re-emerges, akin to the “murmur” invoked in the exhibition’s title. This oscillation produces a form of perceptual breathing room, an interval in which the viewer is compelled to relinquish certainty and remain in ambiguity. The paintings suggest a self no longer defined by explanation or coherence, but by permission to exist, to feel, and to look without resolution.

Ríos describes this by saying, “There is a clear shift from noise to murmur, an inner voice, intuition, a premonition, truth or falsehood; from overflowing fire to inner fire; from the explained self to the perceived self. The works in this exhibition move toward a self that grants itself permission to exist, to feel, and to look.”