Art teacher at a high school falls asleep in classes over and over again. Adolescent of 14, take advantage of that serious labor foul to attack the closet full of materials and start experimenting: Chinese ink, acrylics, oils. The entire universe. Thus the vocation of Paula Rivero.
News: One of the concepts that identify their works is freedom, and what better the way is raided because the teacher sleeps!
Paula Rivero: Yes, the fact that they do not put a limit helps a lot. As you say, freedom is a great search within what my artistic process is and I am always challenging it. I think a question that I ask myself from a lifetime is what freedom is. From the place that I look for or investigate it through my art it has to do with a with a lot of respect for others, considering the human being as something sacred, that we are alive is a miracle.
News: During his childhood and adolescence he lived in Italy, Mexico, Peru and Uruguay. Did he have to do with his family looking for freedom, with an exile for example?
Rivero: No, the many changes in countries were for my dad’s work. He was director of an Italian company and moved us, up to my 22 years. Today I appreciate that life allowed me to live all that because it allowed me to look at things always from different angles. You change the country and things look totally the other way around, everything that was correct there, here they tell you that it is a bad word, that if short skirt was used in a school, it was used to the ankles in another. They were all changes, a lot of diversity.
News: How did he live it at that time?
Rivero: The uprooting were very strong, leaving friends, boyfriend, art workshop; Change and go looking for new ones. And not by my decision … I think I’m getting to something interesting … but because I had to go, because my family was leaving, it wasn’t my own decision.
News: There was no freedom there.
Rivero: You just did a 52 -year -old life therapy (laughs). How interesting this. I just clicks something deeper: it is true, it always depended on a decision that was not mine. I created my world in what they told me and “we have to go there” or “now we go to the other side.” And start again, from zero, miss, nostalgia.
News: At 22 he rebelled and cut off that family decision?
Rivero: No, at 22 it was the last country change that went from Mexico to Argentina. My parents came back and I wanted to stay there, which was my world. And they convinced me to come even 6 months to Argentina. It is seen that my dad had the timing that at 6 months I adapted and said: “If in 6 months you do not adapt, I promise you that we return to Mexico.” The change was very traumatic.
He lacked a year to finish the graphic design career in the Latin American of Mexico and, since his 14 years, he made art workshops in parallel. He went almost every day to take classes with a Mexican teacher with whom he learned technique. But in those 6 months he took roots in Argentina and discovered the career of Fine Arts. It was from the last litter of graduates of the National School of Fine Arts Prilidiano Pueyrredón (then Iuna and now one).
News: What is an artist?
Rivero: It is a question that I ask artists a lot and that I love. For me it is a way of seeing life, it is having your own philosophy. It is being constantly connected to creativity, not understanding life but is creatively and through art. It is finding rhythm to everything, knowing that everything has an answer and that everything flows, everything has its moment.
News: How much does the external guarantee matter?
Rivero: I went through many stages and what you are asking me leads me directly to a moment where I found my identity as an artist. At 14, it was experimenting with the materials, it was something to healer, it was not mental, it was very visceral. As I started studying at workshops, it was wanting to learn to paint well. There comes the endorsement of the people, it was already necessary to tell me “how nice you paint”, “how good you paint.” And at 17, when they acquired two works of mine for the first time, I even got the question: “Are they sure?” Because I couldn’t even believe it, it was strong and from that endorsement, I affirmed that I was on the right path, but it is not what he told me internally that he was an artist.
News: What was it?
Rivero: When I felt that I knew how to paint, I began to consider looking for my own style. I wanted to enter the abstraction but the teacher who had five years in Mexico said: “Abstraction leads to frustration.” It was a very silent search, alone with my art. One day I rebelled and used cheese that was in my house and it was my first abstraction: painting those figures of the cheeses, but in Magentas, turquoise colors. Then I thought I had entered abstraction, but no. When I came to live in Argentina, a need to write in the works began to sprout.
News: Talk about moving from the text to the texture.
Rivero: Yes, it was the year 98, in parallel to study in Fine Arts, I worked in a company to have my income, and I had entered a stage that stressed me because I was very sensitive and I was in a very hostile world, where people were numbers. Then I began to vent in my works, to write above, because I could not paint.
News: Couldn’t I paint?
Rivero: I could not paint the figurative of before, it was an impulse that won me and a necessary writing came out in me, but did not want to read what I wrote. Then he wrote again on what he wrote and that game of the concept of the text that becomes texture and ceases to be a text appears. That’s where I really feel that the artist inside, when it was stronger than my thoughts, was something necessary in me that sprouted. My life is like a movie, all very intense. And I look back and everything has a reason. There is nothing that does not fit, although at the moment one lives it differently. Today with the years I am no longer scared what happens at the present moment, I enjoy it, even if it is bad. I know that the answer comes later, everything has a perfection, so I tell you about the rhythms: in everything for me there is a perfection, in everything there is a rhythm, it is music. So art is rhythm, it’s music; There may be noise, but there is chaos that goes to order, and an order that goes to chaos.
News: She was summoned to donate work for India, how did she live the experience?
Rivero: Yes, it was very nice. If all my life dedicated to art serves to help in this little one to fight the hunger of the world, it was already worth it. Apart from having been there and knowing what the purity of souls is. If I take something from India, it is to feel that people have no hearts, they have no armor. In my works I also speak through the corsets, the armor, which have to do with preconceptions and with that need to show what we are not when we can be what we are. And in India I noticed that shell and that they give you the soul. It is a chaos, but if you focus on the detail or someone, they have an inner peace that is as contradictory with the chaos you are seeing. And I think that is the same as a work of art, chaos but that has an order, there is a harmony, a chaotic harmony, a harmonious chaos.
News: What things are wondering today, at 52?
Rivero: I keep wondering the same as the first day: what is freedom and what it is to be an artist. Because freedom for freedom does not exist, through my work I was noticing: when you break the structure, you enter another. There is always a limit, always, and at one point I need it because it is what gives me security and it lets me do, it’s like swimming in a pool that has water, right? But that freedom has to have that place of respect for the other and knowing at least coordinates where it is.
News: What do you want to achieve?
Rivero: I intend to always be in contact with the creative process. I came to ask if I painted to transcend and came to the conclusion that no. I paint the mere fact of being in contact with the creative process, which is where I feel that I do a pit to life and enter another place, in another plane, where there is no time and there is no space. There I get to the answer of what art is: for me art is all that makes you waste time and space when you start doing it. I live life like this.
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