The movement of life into form speaks to the essence of Ramos Rivera's sense of painting.   Working from his San Francisco studio during the 2020 Covid isolation, the city became his muse. The jigsaw of the flattened skyline, glints of metal and reflective glass, swirls of graffiti, low buildings jumbled into exquisite formation, interlocking triangles, squares, circles; blues, fierce yellows, mauves, implausible pinks and cloudy whites. Traffic lights, somber blacks and the velvety, fog caressed violets of  the nocturnal city, these are the shapes, colors and visual rhythms of this recent body of work.

Gustavo Ramos Rivera is interested in the kind of abstraction whose realization as painting will always express his own enthusiastic absorption of this endlessly rich, continually changing physical world.  Although we, the viewer, would have difficultly directly identifying one particular element and pointing to it--that's the thing on the canvas-- our perception of it is, rather, deeply intuitive, a visual form of our relationship and our sense of the real world.