"OF MUSIC, SOUNDS AND VARIATIONS"

De música, sonidos y variaciones (Of music, sounds and variations) gathers a series of works made within her last four projects. Beginning with Sinestesia (2016/2017), where from a synaesthetic language the artist makes a graphic analysis of music, perceiving the harmonies and rhythms at a pictorial level, in order to compose the work as a visual poem. "Transporting us to other anthropological spheres, to other spaces in which colors and sounds merge and associate in a somewhat utopian intuitive search [...] by wanting us to perceive a rich melting pot of identifications that intersect in an imaginative network of symbolic alliances[1].

In 2018, those musical harmonies transmute into Soundscape (2018) and Mapa Sonoro(Sound Map) (2019), in which Rivas analyzes the soundscape in which we find ourselves and reflects on noise pollution and excess noise in society based on the research of Murray Schafer and John Cage.

In these three projects we can already identify her interest in the creation of her own palette, as Julio C. Vazquez Ortiz writes in 2019: "One of Rivas' obsessions is the tireless search for her own palette, for "her color", transforming the universality of RGB towards the uniqueness of her own tone that drives her message. At the same time, she gathers a formal reductionism, progressively specifying the number of elements that make up each of her compositions, disappearing the line in favor of the color plane. To talk about Virginia Rivas is to talk about painting, of great interest are her investigations on the use of pictorial typographies with which she shapes language(s)[2].

Her most recent work can be seen in Variacions (2020/2021), where she investigates the chromatics of our environment and the perception we have of it according to the different emotional, social and political situations in which we find ourselves, establishing a study of our reality through color. Project awarded with one of the Grants for research, creation and artistic production in the field of visual arts of the Spanish Ministry of Culture and previously selected for ONE PROJECT of Art Madrid 20, curated by Fernando Gómez de la Cuesta: "Virginia Rivas' abstraction employs all the resources at her disposal, making use of many of the plastic possibilities she finds along the way and relying on a complex itinerary that encompasses subtly geometric elements, the recurrence of organic forms, a virtuoso use of color stains and a determined will to integrate a wide range of gestures: from the minimal sign to the broad and strong stroke. The artist does not renounce to anything and moves with solvency through containment, but also through the less contained, even through the wild and the violent, something that fluctuates between the fields of color and that abstract and gestural expressionism that developed from the American context in a brilliant way. A determined bet on painting, frequenting ascetic and minimal compositions of just a few tones, with some unbridled punctual elements that flee from the monotony of pre-established forms, while undertaking a tireless search towards the entrails of that which moves us: genuine painting that is not pending of norms, fashions, trends and stupidities"[3].

Her painting, says Adonay Bermudez, "is intimate, is accessible, is harmony, however much the chromatic flashes, stripes and scratches try to confuse us, submerging us in an apparent chaos. It is a rabid and carefree stroke, without pretensions or search for (self-) recognition. It is truth. It is contrast, it is the superimposition of layers, it is a pictorial camouflage based on blues, pinks and grays. It is subtlety and light compositions. It is the comfort of the large format where she vomits, sutures and embraces through the brush.

Sometimes I feel that I write a diary that nobody knows how to read.

Barking, heart, emptiness. Feeling.

Virginia Rivas, the beauty of painting the whisper[4].

[1] Lozano Bartolozzi, María del Mar. 2016. UN PROCESO PICTÓRICO APARENTEMENTE INOCENTE. Texto exposición Sinestesia. Organización Mundial de la Propiedad Intelectual. Naciones Unidas. Ginebra (Suiza).

[2] C. Vázquez Ortiz, Julio. 2019. PINTURA, SONIDO, CATARSIS. Catálogo Mapa Sonoro. Sala de Arte El Brocense. Cáceres.

[3]  Gómez de la Cuesta, Fernando. Variaciones dentro de Salvajes. La cage aux fauves. Art Madrid 20. Madrid.

[4] Bermúdez, Adonay. 2018. Catálogo Soundscape. Centro de Arte DA2 Domus Artium. Salamanca.