Léa Rivière

Born in France and educated in Europe, she spent many years teaching art as well as producing her own body of work. She has exhibited extensively all over the world, and her paintings can be found in both private and corporate collections. These facts sound dry when speaking of Rivière and her magical world, so far removed from the reality that surrounds us. In her spacious and bright studio, large canvases resplendent with form and colour are like doorways into a mythical, Renaissance-flavoured dimension, where beauty hides in the smooth, velvety rump of a stallion or the sensuous curve of a hip of the woman sleeping on its back. The two are drawn as one, the lines overlap and dance together, the figures only really sketched, unfinished, yet imbued with an overwhelming presence. These are dream images executed with masterly precision, a fluidity that at times equals the unbearably delicate lines of some of the Great Masters in art. She seems to possess a rare talent for creating a living creature or a face from a mass of tangled lines that dance and dance until they take a recognizable shape, and dissipate.

Using mixed media, ink, charcoal, acrylic, scratching and shaping the surface by hand at times, she brings to life faded frescoes that seem to hark to some ancient, forgotten time when women were goddesses, languid spirit riders emerging from an intimate reverie.

As beautiful as her drawings are, Rivière is foremost a painter, and her delicate pen-and-ink and charcoal lines are juxtaposed with dark, geometric patches of sepia and brown, and large expanses of red and bronze with fish skeletons and butterfly imprints in monochromatic relief, resulting in a mixed media work of art with myriad interpretations. The composition is unique and contemporary, a modern amalgam of the classical with the conceptual. The dichotomy created is at the root of understanding the artist's message, the rigidity of material reality versus the gentleness and light of the inner world. The spiritual is symbolised by the vertical joining of the two realms, like a cathedral setting for a coming together.