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ELENA DEL RIVERO
Lawrimore Project is pleased to announce that Elena del Rivero will be the seventh artist to take part in Has Art?, a twelve-part series of exhibitions inaugurating the gallery's new space. Each month, for one year, artists will be paired with a writer and a page from Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés. The writer will provide a critical response to the work as it relates to the poem as well as offer scholarship about the artist’s practice as a whole. As the solo exhibitions progress, a publication will grow and the imperative of the group show will emerge. Elena del Rivero joins Isaac Layman, Jeremy Shaw, Bert Rodriguez, Wynne Greenwood, Carolina Silva and Cris Bruch in this ever-evolving exhibition.
You can follow the progress of the publication and the exhibition HERE.
A printable PDF copy of Has Art? is also available upon request
Simply email: scott@lawrimoreproject.com
concerned
expiatory and pubescent
mute laughter
that
IF
The lucid and seigniorial aigrette of vertigo
with invisible brow
scintillates
then shadows
a stature dainty tenebrous erect
in its siren torsion
time
to slap
with impatient scales ultimate bifurcated
a rock
false manor
right away
evaporated in mists
that imposed
a limit on infinit
The Coherence of Chance
by
Carolina Silva
Look at it closely-----------------------------------------------What do you see?
Lots of little bits of rope all twisted together.
This conversation from the film Whale Rider comes to mind when thinking about the art of Elena del Rivero. In the film, the chief of the Maori Tribe in New Zealand is distraught that no boy has been born to continue the family's place at the head of the tribe and refuses to acknowledge his granddaughter Pai is the true spiritual conduit for their ancestors' heritage. In the scene, they are about to pull a rope to start a boat engine and the chief exhorts the girl to look at the structure that makes the rope reliable, its threads weaved, intertwined. The rope becomes a metaphor of ancestry, family, the past that makes us be here but remains hidden, somewhere codified. That which we don’t choose is therefore chance. However, the rope breaks when they use it, revealing, metaphorically, the weakness of that which was given as sacred and unmovable, its need for change. What is unexpected is this change to come from the hands of the girl, Pai, who is able to repair the broken rope, tying it up and starting the engine again.
When Elena Del Rivero ties, sews, folds and traces connecting lines, she seems to be bringing together broken pieces. There is a restorative quality in the work, one which is healing while symbolically creating something new and totally different. The paper surface becomes like skin or fabric that when looked upon closely reveals a complicated weft: lines that cross, interlace and connect to become one. Rather than a close look, it might be an inner look the work demands, a reverie look.
Like the girl in the film, Elena Del Rivero also claims a capacity, a right that has long been neglected to woman, breaking with the patriarchal reading and asking for a disruptive form that, like Écriture fémenine, brings forth the feminine body and female difference in language and emotion. Her art places experience before language and gives privilege to non-linear but cyclical ways.
Elena Del Rivero belongs to a lineage of artists in which the personal becomes art, in which there is no border between the public and the private realm and still they both remain in permanent mystery, unknown, to be solved.
Art is an essence, a center. I am interested in solving an unknown factor of
art and an unknown factor of life. My life and art have not been separated.
They have been together. –Eva Hesse.
This is probably the reason why the starting point in Elena Del Rivero’s work is usually that which is close to her, in her quotidian: a dishcloth, a letter or a feather that lies in the ground of a park, humble elements she gathers giving them a new dimension, one that is universal, yet enigmatic.
Feathers are a recurrent sign in Elena Del Rivero’s work. In her hands they are sublimated without losing their connection to earth and air: their essence. Feathers, detached from the body of the bird, become something different. They used to be objects with a spiritual dimension, one related to the first and most primordial humanhood, culture and civilization, used in rituals and instrumental for the beginnings of tracing, puncturing and writing. In her hands, however, feathers are no longer obsolete. They become traces of an existence, one that has flown, is lost forever, and will never reconcile with its origin.
There is a certain sense of orphanhood that makes the work heroic while brutally humble, vulnerable while strong, sensitive while self-confident. This is the reason why -contrary to its use in other artists' work- gold doesn’t hurt as an element of luxury; scale doesn’t hurt as an element of dominance. The work of Elena del Rivero has the quality of air: we breath it in almost without awareness, it allows space and in it, gaze seems to float or dance.
By separating from our condition of living beings we forget the most important element for life, air. It is thanks to air that we breathe, live, talk, appear, thanks to it everything ‘becomes present’ and can exist.
We unthoughtfully borrow from this air of birth and growth a physis, a phyein
that the philosopher forgets. In the oblivion of being takes place the oblivion
of air, the fluid that is given gratuitously and without return with the mothers' blood
and then is given again at birth, as a natural profusion that makes us scream in
pain: that of the neglect of whom arrives to the world and must live without the immediate
assistance of other body. Loss that in fundamental nostalgia man will try to fulfill with
his works, builder of worlds, of things and of that dwelling that is essential to man: language.
–Luce Irigaray. An Ethics of Sexual Difference.
All the works presented in this exhibition seem to be at the brink of falling or rising, and although nothing appears to be calculated there is a reason beyond that gracefully creates a leit motiv that weaves the works together. My take is that this reason could very well be chance; a state of mind that allows for the incorporation of accidents, which is contingent upon experimentation, and in which the constant of becoming is always welcome. Chance, as Mallarmé reminds, can never be abolished.
Perhaps because of all the above, the nature of the work requires from the viewer some kind of pause to take in all that is at stake, for time to stop in suspension, for natural light to throw its shadows, for silence to mingle with the unpredictable street sounds, for consciousness to allow dreaming. I wonder if this is also the state in which the artist works.
Beauty itself doth of itself persuade
The eyes of men without orator.
–William Shakespeare. The rape of Lucrece.
