Galerie Rainboww | 2019

Rivera’s exhibition an enthralling journey into the domain of collages, marking a significant evolution in his creative journey. These abstract compositions, spanning a spectrum of sizes, skillfully interlace layers of repurposed adhesive vinyl onto industrial plastic boards. Rivera’s unique process involves sourcing vinyl from deconstructed advertisement posters, giving rise to serendipitous shapes meticulously formed through the deliberate omission of the original content. From these extracted colors, patterns, and gradients emerges the very essence that underpins his collages. Equally captivating are his smaller paper collages, borne from the fragments of dismantled magazine ads, wherein arbitrary shapes rekindle within glass-enelosed negative spaces. Rivera’s methodology casts him as both conductor and translator, illuminating the latent forms and hues inherent in advertisements. The resultant collages transcend personal narratives, instead crafting a lexicon of their own.

Press Release

For his first solo project in New York City, Rivera will present a series of collages from his most recent body of work. Varying in size, the abstract collages weave together colorful layers of adhesive vinyl on recycled industrial-use plastic boards. The vinyl material is sourced via a process of gathering advertisement posters which Rivera then dissects. The consequent shapes are not deliberately formed but are the leftovers determined via the purposeful removal of all recognizable content. Rivera’s extraction of the various sections of color, pattern and gradation then form the palette he uses to create the collages.

Similarly, the smaller paper collages on view are made from magazine advertisements which Rivera dismantles to mine for their shapes and colors. These arbitrary shapes are then layered together and sandwiched between glass forming new shapes within the negative space.

In both bodies of work Rivera has created a method of working in which his role is more akin to an instrument or a channeller that exposes the forms and colors within the advertisements. The collages are detached from any intended personal visual narrative but instead create their own language and live in a space of liminality between the original objective of the ad and the imagined landscapes, objects, body parts and faces which materialize subjectively for each viewer.