The pictorial space as a mirror of memory and desire
by Amable Lopez Melendez

For more than two decades, Rosario Rivera-Bond (1952) has been living and working in Miami. She studied Architecture and Interior Design at the National University Pedro Henríquez Ureña (Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic), and had specialized studies in visual arts at L’Academie de la Grande Chaumière, Paris, France, and at the Camden Art Center, London, England. She studied and resided in Paris, Florence, London, and New York from 1975 to 1979. In 1995, after a prolonged creative pause, she traveled to North Carolina, South Carolina, and New Mexico. In Santa Fe, New Mexico, she met American artist Betty Ridgeway, which whom she intensely practiced abstract expressionism and action painting techniques.

By paying attention to the splendor, post crisis, and resurgence processes of the Western abstract expressionist painting of the 20th century, Rivera-Bond proceeds with lucidity, audacity, and self-demanding attitude when working in her workshop. She knows she confronts the risk of “burning” in the explosion of marketing celebrations or in the imminence of her own creative Parousia. For this reason, she turns radically and irreverently towards random resources and her impeccable intuition, as precise clues to discern signs and symbols, in order to vitalize the functioning of her poetry and the uniqueness of her polyphasic symbolical production.
In her more recent paintings during the last five years, Rosario Rivera-Bond leads us to face the effects of a translucent and intense dialogue, materialized as mirrors with memory and ephemeral and absurd rhizomes. This dialogue operates like delicious and terrible metaphors of the existence, like the daily experience of the post-metropolis, and like a psycho-historical downpour. They are mutant surfaces spiritualized by the rigor of her craft. Their first visual impact is sustained by artistic levels that expand their imagistic flow and discharge the effectiveness of their significant potential.

In some mid-size paintings such as Dramatic Events, Alice in Wonderland, Pizarra Blanca (White Board), and Private Room (2007) dense, uneven, reactive, lyric, whitewashed, and burning surfaces are alternately presented throughout variations, games, and chromatic try-outs of highly contrasting tonalities and intonations.
In Rosario Rivera-Bond’s recent works, we access a repertoire of images charged with power and desire, overflowing with beauty and poignant signs. They represent essentially abstract codes of a ghostly self-significance that invoke what is real and celebrate what is unreal. Her works seduce the spectators’ glance so that they look for indescribable persecution of intimate clues that enliven persistence, the “passionate intensity”, and the refined esthetic sensibility which distinctively characterize her creative personality as a whole.

They are indispensable and increasingly enigmatic codes resulting from Rivera-Bond’s profound existential understanding of the radical elements of the pictorial system. She exhibits a precocious understanding, mystically free from any rational dryness. She establishes an unavoidable, ludic, and transparent embrace with the medium, form, color, space, light, sign, and gesture to arduously search for maximum levels of expressive freedom.

They are polychrome open to the irruption of golden touches, violet fissures, and blue transparences of ultramarine air. They represent pictorial debates of iodine streaks and shadows; maritime itineraries; liquid rose passages, aqua-green, fuchsia, and flammable signs. They evoke the rusting of the grisaille; echoes and sparkles of silica, quartz, amber, seashells, agate corals, and emeralds; traces of golden days, dreams, the “vegetal alchemy” and the volatile blood of minerals, which entail marvelous symbolic implications that come from the same sensuality of the matter and the magic around us.

They are specular spaces of a hyper-mimetic conscious perpetually amazed by the appropriation, transmutation, and polysynthesis of a surprising multiplicity of aesthetics “substances”, concepts, poetic practices, and cultural processes. They bring us fragmentary illuminations, games, collisions, vigils, dreams, solitudes, silences, and rumors of an instant. They embody fugitive urges and reactions. They are reflexive, warm, and whitewashed transpositions of the sign from our otherness and our sameness.
In a series of the small oil paintings All my Friends Series I, All my Friends Series II, All my Friends Series IV, and All my Friends Series V (2009), the delicate and delirious nature of the creative personality of Rosario Rivera-Bond is manifested, as well as the emotional and structural energy which are evident in her recent pictorial production. Transparences, signs, gestures, echoes, sounds of her existence and experience explode with a plastic potential of admirable freshness transporting us throughout unexpected perceptive enclosures. They take us to specific territories of the critical disposition, imagination, nostalgia, love, fraternity, and tenderness.

In another group of works of more challenging formats, such as Brigitte (2009), Eden (2009), La Vie en Rose (2008-2009), Les Jardin aux Fleurs (2009), The Secret (2009), and Wishful Thinking (2009), Rivera-Bond attains pictorial resolutions of artistic effectiveness by utilizing renew, emphatic, and precise colors, the informality of design, the certainty of loose strokes, and expressive effusiveness. Thus, her work explodes into textural games and polychromatic dramatization as reminiscences of experiences, feelings, emotions, hallucinations, and extremely particular emotional intensities.

In other works, Rivera-Bond penetrate with greater conviction and optimal results into the domains of expansive abstraction and explore, with forms and colors, elements of subjectivity, individuality, and social body as the last avatar of the identity consciousness. In these cases, we access a sensitive surface and its meanings, which are based on an extremely individual ludic option. They confirm the essential dialogue her work establishes with the “old clairvoyants” of the best European and North American abstract paintings of our time.

The recent pictorial work of Rosario Rivera-Bond does not misplace the rhythm of life or the colors in nature. In these paintings, she often demonstrates feelings of escape and agglutination; unity and dispersion; lights and shadows; vertical, horizontal, and meandering lines; visual space saturation; and the emptiness and its progressive blooming. The pictorial surface vainly burns as a constant firmament of desire and seduction. The clairvoyant returns to a new positioning facing the freshness of the real creation. The layers and masks appear pierced by an interior brightness equivalent to the spark of life, the appearance, the world image, and the imminence of the fictitious space.

Rosario Rivera-Bond enunciates her plastic composition through masks and reactive textural games, “contaminated” layers and breaking lines, smooth strokes, and liquefied colors. Her work embodies frenzied, harmonious, and discontinuous rhythms; ruptures and conceptual dissolutions that project its aura and is liberated from the limitations of the pictorial tale and the stylistic petrifactions. These are images that represent causes and reasons of the reality and unreality of the objects that inhabit the world of the artist and the spectator. It is a transfigured world marked by a phantasmatic imagery saturated of humor, irony and visual insinuations that rediscovers and provides feedback to the dialogical spaciousness of the abstract painting in an artistic time that is prophetically banalized, precarious, and humanly broken.

Amable López Melendez
Member of AICA [Dominican Republic Association of Art Critics] / Chief Curator of the [Dominican Republic] Modern Art Museum
Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. 01/2010.