ernesto riveiro

Philippe Cyroulnik, 2009
____________________________

Ernesto Riveiro by Philippe Cyroulnik.
Postface of "Les demeures du paraître".
Publication of the 19, Centre régional d'art contemporain de Montbéliard.


Ernesto Riveiro has multiple talents. He draws, paints, sometimes sculpts, or creates what he calls offerings, ex-voto and also objects.
With debris, buttons, nuts and bolts, bone fragments or pieces of metal, broken springs or wood chips, old cloth, a few bits and pieces of string, tidbits, he creates “objects”. Or rather he gives them a face that is to say an identity.
It is a fragile identity, uncertain, often threatened of losing itself in the object, on the brink of disappearance. But it is that same edge that makes them be what they are.
Those beings oppose their presence, with a modest insistence, a discreet stubbornness, to our natural inclination to consign them to the used object shelf.

What makes them be derives from a simple gesture- a dot, a nail or a washer- or other display.
Leonore for instance, four wooden sticks, a dash of red: a nameless puppet. But a seashell changes everything: it becomes a focal point that makes Leonore stare at us with her intense but indifferent look. A character that embodies the paradox of being able to exist without being overtaken by words or stories.

In his relationship with objects Ernesto Riveiro is at the crossroads of certain paths that we do not frequently go down: in an area where Marcel Duchamp and Le Facteur Cheval might meet. A universe where strange adventures could actually happen to things and to objects; like in Borges or Leopoldo Marechal stories. A world where they can be filled with strength, a beneficial or worrisome power in the image of shamanic practices.
Riveiro is an artist who pulls his strength from a crossing of cultures and of times. From his Buenos Aires origins, he drew on an experience of things, their magical or even metaphysical dimension. It would be right to invoke the metaphysical places of De Chirico and the toys of Torres Garcia. Places where one might come upon them, or objects that might be their cousins. But more often they are the spirits of the places that they inhabit, or like some theatre characters, so focused on a mysterious task that they ignore the audience.
He knows perfectly well the crafting of assembling, the practice of collages that characterize the numerous steps of modern art from Cornell to Rauschenberg. But he is also interested in popular practices that invest a symbolic meaning into objects like in votive practices in numerous South American countries. He nourished himself on the genius, inherent to the latin American syncretism that marries Christian and Indian rites. In Argentina, where he is from, there is a strong tradition of popular altars and a constant presence of those objects that have been tinkered with and modified, that take the place of domestic and communal relics.
Ernesto Riveiro comes from that tradition of interpretation and symbolism that one encounters in literature, that transforms the simplest things into metaphysical enigmas .That gives the most insignificant things the appeal of a sphinx… and their ability to be above and beyond the things that surround us.

His objects are present in the world with a tranquil indifference to the daily hubbub. Some are there physically, others reside at the edge of an apparition, safeguarding a "ghostly" effect.

In his paintings and drawing, he doesn’t limit himself to a single territory. He unfolds a subtle game within the space of the picture where spot, line and color tie in together.
The games of superimpositions and associations that he practices lead to a multi focal space at the edge of a landscape or a tale that comes together or unravels to the will of the eye. Within the interlacing of the lines, succession of grids comes into place to deepen the space of the picture.
Lines and spots come to do or undo contours. In some way colors will incarnate, embody shapes that give themselves a sort of apparition of shapes, and ghostly figures.

The essence of his drawing is in the play with the subtle interaction between the stroke and the spot. This network weaves to the whim of the hand's or the thought's inflexions. It digs furrows, meanders on the sheet of paper or splits it until it all takes shape. Until what could be the outline or the echo of a scene in a story without words or a narrative. But it can as easily take it all back. And fold back onto undulating or broken rhythms of a stroke that invades the surface with its movements and its discordances whether they are voluntary or accepted.
That's what creates the appeal of those drawings for the one who is contemplating them. They bring out a simultaneous feeling of familiarity and strangeness: like a landscape or a scene that might have been deleted by time's wear and tear, or on the contrary, sealed within a labyrinth of lines that seem to offer themselves to our gaze to better foil and deceive that temptation to tie them to a possible reality.


Translation : Dominique Ashby.


ernesto riveiro
2009, Philippe Cyroulnik


Philippe Cyroulnik, 2009
____________________________

Ernesto Riveiro by Philippe Cyroulnik.
Postface of "Les demeures du paraître".
Publication of the 19, Centre régional d'art contemporain de Montbéliard.


Ernesto Riveiro has multiple talents. He draws, paints, sometimes sculpts, or creates what he calls offerings, ex-voto and also objects.
With debris, buttons, nuts and bolts, bone fragments or pieces of metal, broken springs or wood chips, old cloth, a few bits and pieces of string, tidbits, he creates “objects”. Or rather he gives them a face that is to say an identity.
It is a fragile identity, uncertain, often threatened of losing itself in the object, on the brink of disappearance. But it is that same edge that makes them be what they are.
Those beings oppose their presence, with a modest insistence, a discreet stubbornness, to our natural inclination to consign them to the used object shelf.

What makes them be derives from a simple gesture- a dot, a nail or a washer- or other display.
Leonore for instance, four wooden sticks, a dash of red: a nameless puppet. But a seashell changes everything: it becomes a focal point that makes Leonore stare at us with her intense but indifferent look. A character that embodies the paradox of being able to exist without being overtaken by words or stories.

In his relationship with objects Ernesto Riveiro is at the crossroads of certain paths that we do not frequently go down: in an area where Marcel Duchamp and Le Facteur Cheval might meet. A universe where strange adventures could actually happen to things and to objects; like in Borges or Leopoldo Marechal stories. A world where they can be filled with strength, a beneficial or worrisome power in the image of shamanic practices.
Riveiro is an artist who pulls his strength from a crossing of cultures and of times. From his Buenos Aires origins, he drew on an experience of things, their magical or even metaphysical dimension. It would be right to invoke the metaphysical places of De Chirico and the toys of Torres Garcia. Places where one might come upon them, or objects that might be their cousins. But more often they are the spirits of the places that they inhabit, or like some theatre characters, so focused on a mysterious task that they ignore the audience.
He knows perfectly well the crafting of assembling, the practice of collages that characterize the numerous steps of modern art from Cornell to Rauschenberg. But he is also interested in popular practices that invest a symbolic meaning into objects like in votive practices in numerous South American countries. He nourished himself on the genius, inherent to the latin American syncretism that marries Christian and Indian rites. In Argentina, where he is from, there is a strong tradition of popular altars and a constant presence of those objects that have been tinkered with and modified, that take the place of domestic and communal relics.
Ernesto Riveiro comes from that tradition of interpretation and symbolism that one encounters in literature, that transforms the simplest things into metaphysical enigmas .That gives the most insignificant things the appeal of a sphinx… and their ability to be above and beyond the things that surround us.

His objects are present in the world with a tranquil indifference to the daily hubbub. Some are there physically, others reside at the edge of an apparition, safeguarding a "ghostly" effect.

In his paintings and drawing, he doesn’t limit himself to a single territory. He unfolds a subtle game within the space of the picture where spot, line and color tie in together.
The games of superimpositions and associations that he practices lead to a multi focal space at the edge of a landscape or a tale that comes together or unravels to the will of the eye. Within the interlacing of the lines, succession of grids comes into place to deepen the space of the picture.
Lines and spots come to do or undo contours. In some way colors will incarnate, embody shapes that give themselves a sort of apparition of shapes, and ghostly figures.

The essence of his drawing is in the play with the subtle interaction between the stroke and the spot. This network weaves to the whim of the hand's or the thought's inflexions. It digs furrows, meanders on the sheet of paper or splits it until it all takes shape. Until what could be the outline or the echo of a scene in a story without words or a narrative. But it can as easily take it all back. And fold back onto undulating or broken rhythms of a stroke that invades the surface with its movements and its discordances whether they are voluntary or accepted.
That's what creates the appeal of those drawings for the one who is contemplating them. They bring out a simultaneous feeling of familiarity and strangeness: like a landscape or a scene that might have been deleted by time's wear and tear, or on the contrary, sealed within a labyrinth of lines that seem to offer themselves to our gaze to better foil and deceive that temptation to tie them to a possible reality.


Translation : Dominique Ashby.