Elena del Rivero: Oeil d'âme

Galeria Elvira Gonzalez in Madrid is hosting these days Oeil d'âme: the latest works of Elena del Rivero. The exhibition will close on March 10.

(video by canalmicro)

There are several things that impress me in the art of Elena del Rivero: the vision of monumental accomplished through mundane materials, the mix of diaphanous and monumental accomplished by some kind of surrendering to the hazard of space, and the passion she puts in searching a meaning in each piece of shabby paper used in her works. I would say that the works of Elena del Rivero are holistic: each small component contains the whole.

Here is a work by Elena del Rivero that is hosted at MoMA: Unfinished Letter to a Young Daughter.



(Contemporary Art)

Elena Del Rivero - [Swi:t] Home: A Chant, 2001 - 2006

Elena Del Rivero - [Swi:t] Home: A Chant, 2001 - 2006

Installation of found papers, burnt, mended, embroidered and stitched to five rolls of muslin

Music: Bring Light, 2006 by Lawrence D. "Butch" Morris

On view at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC.

[Swi:t] is the spelling for sweet, also for suite. So, Sweet Home, or Suite Home?

The home suite of Elena Del Rivero was pretty close to World Trade Center, so it was very damaged. And all her papers became a mess: documents and notebooks, and photographs, and books, and musical scores, everything.

She took paper after paper, mended them as well as possible, and assembled them in a unique artwork: the only way to keep them alive - her papers, her sweet home.

It is a fascinating artwork.

The way it is looking from some distance, like a waterfall, like a wall in a grotto, with stalactites and stalagmites, like a huge column of marble, delicately crafted.

The way it is looking as you come closer: the innumerable papers, here and there burnt, carefully mended.

It is a triumph of transforming very mundane matter in an artwork.

And it contains everything: you get the idea the way it was at the beginning; you get the present look; you get also the whole history of making this artwork - like in a Productionist sculpture of the twenties: it is creating itself in front of your eyes.

[Swi:t] Home: a sculpture that contains within it the raw, the making, the result. Think at Genesis: Chaos, Creation, Creature.

(Contemporary Art)

(Corcoran)