Whoever has undergone the psychedelic experiences that Miguel Angel Ríos has knows that there are at least two altered states of perception induced by mescaline, psilocybin or any other hallucinogenic potions. One is the enhanced perception of colors, sounds, tastes, textures, and smells that are actually there but we normally do not perceive. A second one is of perceptions the mind of the traveler produces but are not really in the external world. The classic explanation of the first kind comes from Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception: "The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.”

But "useless and irrelevant" does not mean uninteresting. Through enhanced perception Ríos and Huxley himself have known not only a plethora of refined sensations but also a keen and atypical awareness of space, time, and the presence and interconnectedness of living and non-living things.

Although their style may appear at first as an amalgam of Georgia O’Keeffe’s and Fauve landscapes, Rios's paintings in his current exhibit, “Merged with Vastness” - more than the result of an aesthetic stylistic decision - are the translation of a mystic experience. Every artist responds to a psychedelic experience with her/his own psychological, cultural and artistic baggage. The San Francisco psychedelic poster artists of the 1960s borrowed from Art Nouveau, Surrealism, Pop Art, and that second type of altered state mentioned above. Ríos has responded depicting vibrant landscapes, himself, and a handful of living organisms (dogs, cacti, soil, sky) that stand separately yet together in the same horizon of being. Their intense colors are the hues of enhanced or altered perception.

The exhibition will remain on display through March 8.