Mixed

20 sep 2024 > 01 dic 2024

Sweet dreams

By Carlos Rivero

Carlos Rivero

TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes opens the exhibition on Friday, September 20, at 6:30 p.m. Sweet dreams, by Carlos Rivero. The exhibition is part of the cycle Leaks and can be visited in this space until December 1.

Curatorial team: Isidro Hernandez, Mateo Mate and Ramon Mateos

About the painter Carlos Rivero

After his time at the independent contemporary art space Nobody Never Nothing Noand by the TEA art room of the municipality of Candelaria, the painter Carlos Rivero presents in the Cycle Leaks from TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes a sample of his most recent works in watercolour and drawings. His is an experimental and totally free use of colour and stroke, so that the whole of his works is marked by the sign of the unexpected and spontaneity.

Carlos Rivero (Tenerife, 1964) studied Fine Arts at the Faculty of La Laguna and completed his studies at the Complutense University of Madrid, specialising in engraving. In that city he exhibited individually in various galleries and art halls, including the Estampa Gallery and Tercer Espacio, and participated in other collective exhibitions. He currently resides in the Canary Islands. Several of his paintings were hung at the CAAM in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in the context of the collective exhibition 7.1 Distortions, documents, trifles and stories (2007), and in On painting (2013), and in 2010 he presented the project Swamp in the Arte Contemporáneo SAC Art Gallery of the Government of the Canary Islands, 2010.

He has also exhibited several paintings in group shows held at Tea Tenerife Espacio de las Artes; such as in the project The pitcher broke (2010), in Fantastic Zoology (2012) and in the collective exhibition The end of the world as a work of artwhich was visited at TEA in 2016 and later traveled to the La Ragenta Art Center in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Other individual projects of his are: Barbarian Jewels (BBAA Circle); Cynicism survives (La Laguna Athenaeum); Double your memory (Artizar Gallery); The crazy virginsheld at the Bronzo art space in La Laguna. Also, the project Death and resurrectionopen to the public in the Bibli art gallery in Santa Cruz de Tenerife. His work as an editor of artists’ books is also very noteworthy. Under the label Carnethe painter has published a dozen installments of artist books, proof of his tireless experimentation in the field of painting and drawing. Likewise, Carlos Rivero has developed, for several years, video-creation works, establishing communicating vessels between the obsessions and beings that inhabit his painting and these new creations designed for the screen and moving images.

When visiting the studio of the artist Carlos Rivero or attending his latest exhibitions, we realise to what extent his painting always remains beyond all foreseeable experience, because the source of his images flows from the primitive earth of an obsessive, magical, tenebrous and dark world. The painter is a visionary capable of bringing to our gaze images only glimpsed in the most unexpected and distressing dreams, or in the pages of a book by Gérard de Nerval. Carlos Rivero’s painting does not pretend to please anyone; it flees from complacency like someone who fears the plague. His colours, smelly, earthy, emaciated, born from the vomit of conscience, show before our eyes the nausea and putrefaction of bodies. But they also insinuate, with their painful flame, born from the depths, the incandescent lights of the sacred.

[Isidro Hernández]

SWEET DREAMS

These works by Carlos Rivero show the eternal effort to reconcile our ego between our desires and social reality, between the delicate and the violent, between careful and haphazard work. They are a mixture of tenderness and sadism, arising freely.

How can we show in a drawing of a body the ambivalence between masculine and feminine? Between what is concave and what is penetrating? Between the vertical and the horizontal as perpendicular forces that do not touch each other? In these images Carlos Rivero shows us the intimate diary of an unresolved ego and the paper becomes a battlefield in which its shadow is shown in the freest possible way.

Without liquid elements, existence would not be possible. In sex, power and fluids form a chemical and psychological mortar; they relate in a complex and natural way. How can we relate the water in a watercolor and the smell of semen that passes through the idea that provoked it? Penises, viscera, vaginas, asses, fungi, fermentation, fertilization, penetration, contamination and contagion emerge when puddles and fluids mix freely in the shadows.

[Mateo Maté]