March 15 - May 19, 2001 at Museo de Arte y Diseno Contemporeano, Costa Rica
by Rolando Barahona-Sotela, Curator
Angiola Rilva-Churchill, artist and teacher of Lombard Heritage, initated her creative work in the fifties, times in which is still hard for a woman wishing to participate actively, to be listened and taken into consideration. She studied, painted and worked until she became the first full-time female art professor in New York University, showing that with tenacity it is possible to subvert the patriarchal values that control women and to participate actively in a cultural dynamics, even in competitive media such as Manhattan, Italy and other European cities. That is why this active artist, with a timeless attitude, with projects always under her sleeve, confirms Simone de Beauvoir’s words: “Old age is not a necessary conclusion in human existence”.
Parallel to her role as a teacher, Churchill has been elaborating her own symbolic language in painting, incorporating it as a generator of concepts in her exhaustive exploration of the infinite paper qualities, conferring new values to it in the communication of hidden gestures. This materials, which continues to evolve since its invention in China and its diffusion by the Arabs, is the artist’s favorite. This is due to the paper’s noble physical presence and ambivalent qualities, which she uses as a metaphor of the woman’s role is social order and if the impotence felt by the impossibility of expression due to women’s inherited silence.
It is therefore that, together with the curiosity about penetrating the scope of the most precise optical instrument inside the “magic of vision”, she creates a large scale installation for Gallery I of the MADC, a personal artistic expression which rises from within, evoking the sensibility if the skin an d the vulnerability of feelings.
The large installation “Witnesses” is the answer to a curatorial process started in the artist’s studio during 1999. It is composed of four pieces: The Garden, Procession, The Walls of The Eye and The Space of The Moon. Nature, the regenerative essence of the feminine potential and the luminous side of the human being, have been inspirational key points for Riva Churchill, who abstracts the concepts of the geometrical and the organic in nature to reinvent the surrounding, aggressive world and restore the constructive optimism, using the many sided properties of paper, similar to the ones in an ecosystem: fragile and vulnerable, yet malleable and consistent at the same time. A game between luminous and spatial penetration, held between forms and textures elaborated in diverse types of white paper, creating sensorial realms, of ethereal essences when unfolded.
Paper that, when entering the room, is transformed into observed eyes and observers at the same time, inducing the spectator to the feeling of being exposed and vulnerable to alert, inquisitive eyes that seems to be guardians of the spaces that can be glimpsed behind them, in a calm sensuality of contemplative and pacifying nature.
Spaces created by the symbolism of a repetitive whiteness that seems to present the naked purity of innocence and the transparency of humility. The silence hides memories that go back to the games she used to play during her childhood years in Italy, brought alive by the energy of mental images of gone beloved ones.
Paper turned into floating creatures dressed in elaborate designs, “reflecting knowledge of cultures” in lace and filigree that help us make contact with the ancestral feminine perseverance, or with the ability and the meticulousness - not necessarily weak - that have surrounded women’s social role.
Paper turned into foliaceous waterfalls, recreating the floating city of Venice, its channels and secret gardens. It is therefore that the hard job of life regeneration is felt between the three-dimensional skin figures that float in a silence that seems to slip through the cracks of another dimension, in between what can be touched, the physical, the emotional and the enigmas of the infinite. A white and calming silence that makes us face the final cause, our own self, through inquiring eyes.
In that way, the artist reveals her subjective and creative ways of seeing and interpreting time, by materializing it as a fragile collection of papers, hand-braided with infinite patience. It seems as if she were weaving the inherited energy of her ancestors, the rights and values acquired as an active woman throughout her life and through an eternal present that continually renews new challenges, regardless of age.
Therefore Riva Churchill serenely intervenes the room and creates translucent walls that suggest moving forward in time to a suspended infinite, in a network of longitudinal lines in highly elaborate or painted paper. Lines that lead the spectator through a thin entrance into a space that opens up into a huge luminous circle composed by hundreds of eyes. A space that in the shadow could be merging or sinking into the pavement gallery, in front of an empty eyed lunar jury that at the same time reminds us of the continuous persecution of consciousness, yet always facing the light of hope.
In these glances, the artist recreates the myth of the eye that communicates a thousand gestures, the penetrating and inquiring pupil. An eye that is transformed and that can be wild and lively or sweet and serene, yet always watching. Languages that reveal mental secrets, as they are unable to hide inside the most expressive, incisive and concentrated natural sphere: the eye.
In this way, Riva Churchill breaks the barriers of collage, multiplying the hanging elements, moved as visitants walk by, which flood the gallery with a dynamism that seems to be static and silent at first glance. A silence with which the artist invites us to experience sensations inside what is incorporeal and to be part of the intuitive realm, in a micro world of light and shadows beyond the physical form.