Subtração

SUBTRACTION, the title of the exhibition, puts the ambiguity between abstraction and representation under suspicion.

Stefano Riva’s works are based on spatial and colour coordinates that immediately establish them as realities in themselves. They are compositions-possibilities, spatialities yet to come.

It goes without saying that his works are made up of matter and physicality, even when they don’t want to be constructions. Or that his questions seek to make inroads into the field of architecture through figurative plasticism.

It is therefore through experimentation with form, colour potential, the superimposition of layers of paper that defy transparency and promise three-dimensionality or brushstrokes of thick paint that denote different times of acting on the painting, that Stefano Riva takes a path of permanent subtraction and purification.

Instead of an understanding of space as a project, Riva makes the segregation of space the process itself, whether through real and absolute space or the ambition for ideal and subjective nature.

Subtraction may consist of being detained in the nonconformist exercise of purification, in the search for possibility, or perhaps in the scrutiny of freedom.

-text by Soraia Fernandes-