Ernesto Riveiro

This monograph presents Riveiro’s work from 1987 until now, highlighting his paintings, drawings and other art objects.

Argentine artist Ernesto Riveiro has a career spanning over fifty years. Based in Paris since the 1970s, Riveiro’s is best known for his polyptychs, works composed of two panels of wood, two separate and distinct instances of painting. For more than thirty years, the artist has aspired to autonomous painting with characteristics of his own invention. This theme has laid the groundwork since 1987 for a whole new phase thathas lasted into the present.

For Riveiro, it is the materials and his interaction with them, his expert handling of these – both the supports, especially the wood, and the pigments, binders, the paint itself, among others – that define his work.

The qualities of Riveiro’s painting lie beyond the reach of words, or perhaps can be apprehended only through poetic language. However, we might cite among the qualities of its poetic universe its tékne, which denotes a way of knowing.

The artwork is executed by an artist, and the pieces of Ernesto Riveiro are rife with vitality. They possess a pulsating quality that is hard to situate. They are shot through with their own immanence: that is, by an essence inherent only to each one of them, to the artist, and, definitively, to the realm of art.

About the Authors

Mercedes Casanegra - Art critic and researcher based in Buenos Aires. She specializes in Contemporary Art and is an independent curator.

Philippe Cyroulnik - Art critic and exhibition curator. He was director of the Regional Contemporary Art Center of Montbéliard (France).

Céline Delavaux - Writer, essayist, collaborator of artistic and cultural reviews, exhibition curator, specializing in Art Brut.