Javier Riera

During his career, the artist focuses on the description of the energies that shape nature’s ways and geometry’s ability to represent it. His work manifests an exceptional calm and reveals a balance between emotion and reason, in which light always plays a main role, with a sense similar to one in a Baroque painting. The abstract light that emanates from his painting leaves time in suspense and provides a permanent existence to things.

In Noche Áurea, Riera takes an important turn in his work towards an exploration of the photographic medium which the artist feels is a continuation of his paintings. The painting abandons the traditional support of the canvas to expand and express itself in other media; he has a special interest in the experience of light and the way it has been recorded by artists, in order to propose different ways of representing the world, including a curiosity for optical instruments, such as the camera obscura.

The analogue photographs that the artist obtains, after long exposures at night, are part of a comprehensive process in which it is essential to experience landscape. Riera chooses those landscapes where he senses the echo of something that is in nature itself. He looks for a specific moment in which brightness does not seem to have anything to do with the passage of time and projects geometric drawings from diverse places and which have a definite symbolic force. Such is the case of his mandalas, labyrinths and Celtic spirals that contrast with the irregularity of the landscape, leading to the "superposition of two different mathematics" that do not conflict. Light does not serve only to illuminate the landscape but moulds it, imposes its own architecture on it. The presentation of his work on small media has the aim of achieving a certain intimacy with the audience and a silent relationship which gives rise to an inner and emotional insight of nature.