“Emotionally Charged.” Ten years of Rosario Rivera-Bond.
by Katherine Chacón

In the mid-1970s, when she embarked on her art studies at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris and the Camden Art Centre in London, Dominican American artist Rosario Rivera-Bond undertook a tacit commitment to the frank expression of her inner self. Since then, she has created an extensive body of work that, while falling within contemporary expressionist currents, is difficult to classify. Her practice, although predominantly pictorial, is openly experimental and includes collage, installation, assemblage, agglomeration, and participatory events.

The twenty-five works gathered in “Emotionally Charged”—held at Miami International Fine Arts (MIFA)— span a ten-year period of production; a decisive period in Rivera-Bond’s career, marked by the gradual moderation of the elements in her language. Gradually, her painting abandons thick layers of vibrant color that characterized it until the beginning of the second decade of the millennium, to make room for neutral spaces that act as a background. Without forsaking emotional power and intuitive discharge, the painting integrates more lyrical strokes, pastel tones or less intense contrasts, in compositions that refer to the landscape or vegetation.

A significant part of Rosario Rivera-Bond’s production is organized into series. These are created without prior planning, bringing together works with similar characteristics afterwards. “Happy Ashes,” a series initiated in 2016, is a turning point in Rivera-Bond’s trajectory. The presence of raw canvas and the use of matte pigments determined some of these changes. Spontaneous and colorful strokes on the naked canvas—light as ash carried by the wind—interweave with grays and deep blacks, enriching the visual and connotative tension of these pieces.

In “Unbounded,” a series developed from 2017 onward, the artist applies various painting techniques without restrictions. Lines and stains appear alongside splatters and drips. She also introduces collage, spray stenciling, and geometric linear modules. Neutral backgrounds emphasize the volatile quality of the strokes reminiscent of Cy Twombly’s abstract expressionism and fluidity of form, one of Rivera-Bond’s key inspirations.

“Back to my Garden” is Rosario Rivera-Bond’s most recent series. Returning to the house where she had raised her children, in Coconut Grove; made her reminisce about a cluster of cherished family moments and to once again enjoy the lush tropical garden she saw each morning through the windows of her new studio. Initiated in 2019, “Back to my Garden” connects the artist with the sensuality of nature and the tenderness of home memory, directing her subsequent production towards less impetuous solutions. Some works display gentle contrasts of pastel and almost childlike tones, such as watery greens, pinks, and blues. Over time, pigment covers the canvas again, abandoning the neutral backgrounds of her previous series in sinuous compositions that allude to the landscape.

Rivera-Bond has described her practice as follows: “My painting reflects my own life. In the creation process, I explore my subconscious and never start from a preconceived idea. My work is completely intuitive and depends on my mood. It could be said that my works are abstractions of my imagination and the emotions that arise at the moment of painting. It’s all about the process of painting itself. In the end, what I want viewers to see is the painting and it does not matter if they bring their own stories to it because I am all about pleasure and fantasy. My purpose is to create tensions between emotion, gesture and color in seductive and sensual compositions. Similarly, my work is very physical. I work quickly and that requires an enormous amount of energy. I like large canvases. It is a challenge to paint on a large surface where I am free to improvise. This encourages me to experiment with new ideas and techniques. I love the surprise because it stimulates the viewer with incoherent aspects and unpredictable images.”

Addressing the challenges of contemporary creation with fierce automatism, Rosario Rivera-Bond’s practice is sustained in the unstable field of free associations and in the liminal tension between the ‘abstract’ and the ‘representational’, terms that become insufficient to describe a work concerned with emotion, memory, and even deeper and more indecipherable drives.

Text created for the exhibition “Emotionally Charged”. Miami International Fine Art. Miami, 2024.