Juan Rivero

Juan Rivero Biography

Spain, born 1976

Juan Rivero Prieto was born in Cuba in 1976, and graduated from the Higher Institute of Art, Havana, Cuba, 2001. Years later he moved to Spain, where his work continues today.

The position of Juan Rivero in art is as far from a decorative vision as a mystical or ceremonial. No immersion in the cosmos, no Icarian dreams, no metaphysical essentialism; His work seeks to expose the human body to twist and distort it, to humiliate and display it in all its strength and neglect, in all its brilliance and misery, impressing on them the most personal, unique and exclusive to the idiosyncrasies of the artist, who can afford the spectacle of the terrible and the problematic, even the terrible action of mutilation, decomposition, negation, because what exists, even all that exists, until every being, irritates him.

The artist uses artistic mediums in a way that these will allow him to emphasize the physical and visual sensation of the flesh (the body as laboratory material), which predisposes to touch and scrutiny of the surgeon.

One of the basic elements through which Rivero emphasizes this feeling, is the severe frontality, the direct confrontation of the figures with the viewer. They remind women totems, prehistoric Venus, porn actresses. Ancient and modern blend together to transmit a state without fear of the terrible, as well as the value and freedom from something powerful, from something that produces fear.

It seems as if on he were allowed the evil, the absurd, the informal, the ugly - but not devoid of sensuality and eroticism - as a consequence of an overabundance of creative forces, fertile, able to create from any desert a lustful garden.