Walking into the JO-HS presentation at Untitled Art Miami Beach 2025, Rodrigo Echeverría’s world takes over before your eyes fully register it. It feels immediate like stepping into a place that existed long before you arrived, where forms are already shifting, where bodies are already dissolving and reforming. You sense that you’ve entered an ecosystem rather than an exhibition.
The Mexico City-based artist (b. 1988) brings three major paintings and eight smaller works on wood panels, but the number hardly matters. His works operate less as discrete objects than as portals, thresholds into a pictorial universe where nothing stays still. What makes this presentation so compelling is not simply the strength of each image, but the sensation of witnessing imagination in constant motion.
Origins, Iconography, and Fluid Identity
Courtesy of JO-HS and Rodrigo Echeverría.
Rodrigo Echeverría, who is largely self-taught, carries his origins with him a conservative Catholic upbringing, years of introspection, the emotional and spiritual textures of Mexico City, and an instinctive pull toward images that refuse to behave. His work feels shaped by memory and rupture in equal measure. You see the inheritance of religious iconography, but also his refusal to let it determine the boundaries of what can be felt, represented, or believed.
“Nothing is fixed not identity, not narrative, not form.”
Across these new paintings, figures appear and vanish like recollections. Bodies twist, merge, sprout new limbs, or thin out to mist. Nothing is fixed not identity, not narrative, not form. There is always a sense of the before and after coexisting in the same image. That is perhaps where his contemporaneity most clearly resides: he creates a visual space where hierarchies collapse and the viewer is invited into a world that is continually being unmade and remade.
Neo-Baroque Language and Transhistorical Layers from Rodrigo Echeverría
Courtesy of JO-HS and Rodrigo Echeverría.
When speaking about his practice, Rodrigo Echeverría often returns to the idea of neo-baroque “the coexistence of heterogeneous visual languages within a single pictorial body.” In person, the phrase clicks. His images hold multitudes: pre-Hispanic memory, Catholic symbolism, Classical Egyptian codes, fragments of places he has lived (Beirut, Cairo, Montreal), and the emotional weather of the global south in a moment of profound unrooting. Yet none of these references appear as quotations. Instead, he breaks them down and reassembles them an archaeological process, but poetic, tender, and at times mischievous.
In Miami, this process becomes visible. The JO-HS booth carries the atmosphere of something excavated images eroded, repainted, reconsidered. Echeverría doesn’t paint icons; he paints the breaking open of icons. He hacks the visual canons he inherited, revealing the logics behind them only to scramble them into an open-source system a visual language available for reimagining.
The tension between chaos and delicacy becomes the emotional anchor of the presentation. There’s a grace to the way he stages collapse. A softness in his violence. A generosity in the way his compositions offer both excess and disappearance. To stand before one of his paintings is to feel that everything is ending and beginning at the same time.
A Career in Motion and an Invitation to Rethink
Courtesy of JO-HS and Rodrigo Echeverría.
Echeverría’s path to this moment is just as layered as his works. His early exhibitions in Mexico City El fracaso in 2016, Corro mudo de nube y charco in 2022, ¡Qué Cholulada! in 2024, already revealed the artist’s instinct to push form to its threshold. Training in Montreal, a residency in Beirut, research in Cairo, and an advanced diploma in Ancient Egyptian writing have all contributed to a practice that is truly transhistorical. His paintings often read like palimpsests: histories, myths, and personal memories accumulating until distinctions blur.
It’s a vocabulary that resonates far beyond the canvas. Rodrigo Echeverría collaborates with filmmakers, choreographers, sound artists, philosophers. His pieces have appeared in Netflix and Apple TV+ productions, integrated into scenes that demand psychological depth and emotional tension. He is an artist whose imagery never sits still who understands the fluidity between mediums, contexts, and worlds.
“Echeverría is not offering images but questions.”
Yet painting remains his core, his anchor. And at Untitled, this devotion feels palpable. The three large works reveal an artist in full control of his instability someone who understands how to bring the viewer into an image not through clarity, but through density and invitation. The smaller works on wood feel almost like devotional objects not in the religious sense, but as intimate, concentrated condensations of emotion and symbol.
Standing inside the booth, you get the sense that Echeverría is not offering images but questions. Questions about how we see, what we inherit, what we choose to keep or discard, and who gets to define beauty or spirituality today. He is dismantling the architectures that shape our perceptions not with anger, but with curiosity and a kind of radical tenderness.
The Possibility of an Unwritten Canon
Courtesy of JO-HS and Rodrigo Echeverría.
“Hacking the Canon,” as JO-HS frames the presentation, is ultimately not an act of destruction but of possibility. In Echeverría’s hands, imagination becomes a form of resistance a way to open windows inside long-closed rooms. His canvases resist the idea that identity is stable, that beauty is singular, that spirituality must follow a script.
Instead, they offer a world where everything is porous, where bodies leak into landscapes, where histories coexist, collide, and mutate. They ask us to see beyond what we’ve been taught to recognize. To feel without demanding closure. To let go of the need for order and step into the pleasure of perpetual becoming.
In a fair week as saturated as Miami Beach, where everything competes for attention, the JO-HS booth stands out precisely because it invites slowness. You stay with the paintings because they stay with you. They unsettle, but also soothe. They fracture, but they heal. They remind you that the image at its most powerful is not a mirror but an opening.
