Juan Rivero – Obsessions

Cuban artist Juan Rivero (Holguin, 1976), trained in painting, proposes with his creative process a peculiar approach to the pictorial fact. Although he uses oil painting to exorcise his ideo-aesthetic concerns on canvas, he transgresses the traditional technique. In a sort of alchemy he conceives his works that, among dense and vaporous images, build a plural landscape of the human.

As Cuban critic and curator Abram Bravo Guerra comments: “Juan Rivero’s work is composed of two primordial pulsations in constant struggle: a chaotic force of violent vibrations and grotesque nuances (thanatos), and the simplicity of beauty in its pure and naïve form, wrapped in sexual complacency (eros). Perhaps it is the tugging between both natures that gives shape to an extremely versatile and uncomfortably diverse work; as if the balance were torn between one extreme or the other. Juan paints in an exorcising act, tearing demons apart in a desperate attempt to understand himself.”