March 15 - May 19, 2001 At Museo de Arte y Diseno Contemporeano, Costa Rica
by Tahituey Ribot-Pérez, Chief curator - MADC
The art pieces presented at the MADC in gallery 1, belong to four moments in the creative praxis of the experienced artist Angiola Riva-Churchill, showing the relationship between the Italian and the American cultures that dwell in her.
This exhibition denominated as “witnesses” could also be called Installation of paper made into love and poetry. It is a composition of diverse handmade art pieces as a proof of determination, patience and positive thinking. The artist came to Costa Rica, for the first time, invited by the director and curator Roland Barahona, in a daring purpose to make the third edition of the exhibition about design and technology called DIS+ART+TEC , in the other MADC galleries, coincide with the refined work of this renowned artist. This is a valid determination: a contrast of images is created between the handmade atmospheres elaborated and designed by the artist, and the design of the audiovisual world of publicity, in which technology is the main element. A singular parallelism, considering that communication is the main goal for both.
The contact with “Witnesses” is undoubtedly an impact and a gratifying experience, in which the dialogue established with memory, the architectonic space of the room and the spectator is outstanding. Most of the works hand as tapestries, made in white paper, as pure as light. The manual labor is presented as the ancestral work renewed by the artist in depurated pieces, elaborated in a unique material that communicate emotion and pleasure. A material that conforms as original space, which lights up, divides or becomes transparent at the same time, and which evokes at times a theatrical atmosphere. In this magical site everything is related, as a game between time and space, a game that takes a graden, the eyes, a unique procession of floating creatures, and the moon, as its “witnesses”.
In the Garden, inspired by the essence and emotions of Venice, the city built among and above the waters, the artist transcribes symbols into the paper that refer to Nature, to animals and to human beings. Symbols that face the imaginary and whimsical observation of the rain, in the almost never-ending movement of water, the essential element, as they glide through the paper. She always uses this material in its simplest form and color, and plays with the light to recreate the garden that will also be a refuge for meditating about herself and about her feminine essence. In this case, the paper is presented to us as a productive and sensitive individual, in which the inner vision of the artist is emphasized to its maximum, in the force that the observed image transmits. Thus, the garden is exhibited as the beginning of a game with pure paper, in which the first sensation is to penetrate inside a unique world filled with restlessness and thousands of new questions that will eternally coexist around ourselves. A game that intents to go beyond our essence as human beings.
But the Garden does not play as a solitary essence inside a spatial manipulation of harmony. Other eyes that represent both past and present, and that also look into the future, appear together with the inquiring and observant eyes. These observing witnesses are another vital element of the work of art. The eye walls are not lonely eyes, but silent courts of our journey through life. They are eyes that seem to rest, but at the same time remain alert, as eyewitnesses of an earthly life that moves around the unconscious game of the unexpected.
Then, in a third act, creatures without bodies, textured garments with empty limbs suspended in the air appear. Images that float in a world between what is sublime and what is real. It is a walk in silence, but without movement, a feeling, a Procession towards the Divine. They are empty figures that run away from the Garden, yet at the same time come back to it, in a hopelessly retracted way.
In another hidden space, the room of the moon, the artist introduces her many-sided element, paper, with multiple textures, in interaction with an enormous moon that rests on the earth. It is a circle in a constant dialogue with a big choir of multiple moons floating in space. Here, the cycle of interrelation is fulfilled when we find these moons of empty eyes that talk about luminous phases, with light apparently coming out of them. The double face of the moon becomes evident in a game that can take us to the observers’ double standard, who feel at the same time as the ones being observed.
Riva Churchill’s art has an aesthetic creed that emphasizes and gives special importance to feeling, memory or to the overflowing of individuality inside the diverse artistic expressions. Here, we can see the artist’s experienced use of paper, as well as her essence as a master in visual arts. Her work makes us enjoy the unconscious search of our own witnesses in order to be able to find an escape in our wandering through life.
Angiola Churchill deciphers with her paper installations, a mystery that surpasses her mundane self, the mystery that every artist assumes the one of communication between the spectator and the creator.