| By Jean-Pierre Flueve "All art is contemporary, if it's alive; and if it's not alive, what's the point of it?" -David Hockney. Hockney's words may carry an air of defiance to some, but the challenge is not new. Mark Rothko, an influential American artist of the last century, asserted in 1943 "...it can be said that all of art is a portrait of an idea." As an idea, then, art is beyond form. It has evolved beyond its historical purpose to be a record of events or people or lifestyle, recording life but having no such spark of its own. Just as the French Impressionists broke through the bounds of studio walls to capture the freedom of life as it was lived, today's artist has burst the binds of representative art to express that which may have no shape; indeed, to express a new creation. Freed from the need of description, the possibilities are endless. The whole of man's experience, his world, becomes his model. In Riva's Coupled Pulse series, embedded in the folds and caresses of texture and color, are fragments of the world that surrounds us, confines us, librates us and, ultimately, defines humanity's playground. And a playground it appears, thanks to Riva's talent for expressing the abstractive joy of ambiguity. These paintings demonstrate Riva's depth of control and lack of sentimentality that are reductive of reason, pathologically honest and, in the tradition of van Gogh, demonstrably active in much the same way a video of nature on fast-forward would appear frozen on canvas. Brush strokes are applied in layers whose depth always hints at another secret. Seen as a whole the paintings are majestic, seen as detail they become disturbing reminders of what we lost, may yet lose, and cannot afford to: the life force itself. Riva's Portraits are a stark contrast visually, devoid of nature: man reduced to personality. These are mysterious and challenging - exchanging a cubist's faceted planes for angular, sweeping, meticulously applied brushstrokes that impart monumental and sculptural quality to dazzling portraits of self, wife and celebrity (Marlene Dietrich, whose well-known face is represented in Riva's Portraits series, was the artists great-grandmother). The painting technique is remarkable for its brilliance of color and the complex, dense patterning of features. As Kandinsky expressed, time in the picture "is emphatically experienced suddenly, in the here and now." His Works on Paper, once again, take a turn from depiction, relying on the abstract, the accident and, above all, the flow of the conscious. Reflects Riva, "Accidents are at the very root of our natural progression as a race. The very freedom to err is at the very heart of my exploration on paper." His works on paper are less paintings, more an experience shared with the viewer. Again, it is almost as if the artist is taking a leaf from Mark Rothko: "They are not pictures. I have made a place." |
