Special Interview with Clara Rival

conducted by Marlene Lahmer

“I’m 36 years old. My favourite shirt is big and colourful. I’m from the city, but in the last few years I have been living more at the beach and in natural places, and I think after a while of being in one of them, I need the other one. I have seasons of doing one thing a lot, and then I change and do another. I like to change but to repeat in that change.”

In your paintings, we see vibrant colours coming together in tropical forests and architectural shapes. How is your process?

For example, what was your starting point for “Recuerdo inventado de Xilitla”

First, I choose a colour for the background and a motif. In this case, the reference is to a surrealist garden in Xilitla, Mexico. It’s an unreal scenery built by Sir Edward James, who was obsessed with the surrealists and wanted to create a complete surrealist environment. There is a mix of memories, factual objects and inventions that come together in the painting. It’s a pastiche, for example there’s a bakery floor I saw on one of my trips.

But generally speaking, my methodology of painting changes all the time, also within one painting. I choose a background colour and then I listen to a song and it sends me wandering and then the mood of the painting takes a different direction. In a way, you never find the answers you are looking for in a painting, just more questions and starting points for further explorations. For example, here I’m interested in how the colours look after the rain and this has been part of previous paintings, too.

In your exhibition at FLIPA. Art Gallery, you really draw us into your world. Your paintings in all kinds of sizes come together as an installation. Is that a recent development in your practice?

No, I‘ve been doing that in the past. It’s something I find great about having exhibitions, I can arrange my work in a way that makes sense beyond a single painting. I like it a lot when I can think of paintings as a group to be exhibited. I enjoy that more than showing one painting out of the blue. Some years ago, I made more works on paper and I did a huge collage of them on the wall for one show. For me, it’s not only about creating spaces in paintings, but about creating a space in which the paintings can communicate with each other.

The plants you are painting at the moment, are they images taken from real plants or do you paint from memory?

More from memory, and sometimes I mix two plans and invent a new one. I take pictures of plants for inspiration, but it’s never an exact reproduction or a very technical one. Sometimes I like a shape and I use it, so it’s more morphological I would say. I take the idea and I like the way it falls, but I start drawing and I invent, it’s not realistic at all.

It’s about creating a space in which the paintings can communicate with each other.

You grew up and studied in Argentina, and then you lived in Mexico for a while, then in France, and now in Spain. What changed everytime you moved?

It’s different everywhere, of course. I like that, it’s fun for me, it’s inspiring to get to know the new things and cultures, and that people are different but the same all at once. Well, in Spain I feel like it’s very similar to home. There are many Argentinians here too. But it changes everywhere. It’s something I enjoy and I find very interesting, the possibility also to adapt to different things and to learn. I’ve always liked travelling for that matter.

everywhere, they were for sure meaningful in my practise. And it’s funny because sometimes after that, in some places, people would ask me if I was Brazilian because of my paintings. It has clear this marked me. When I was still living in Argentina, my paintings were less ... exaggerated, and a bit more sober. Argentina is not that tropical compared to Mexico or Brazil. And when I moved to France and there was lockdown, I stayed with the exotic and tropical colours of Mexico. But well, here in Barcelona I started using some patterns that may be related to Andalusia or Morocco in my work.

Travelling is also an important keyword in your work. How did these different places influence your painting?

Well of course, Mexico is very colourful and the landscapes are exuberant and rich and you can see colour everywhere. Also when I was in Brazil - I never lived there, but I did trips for some months - the plants and the colours in the streets

Not yet, but I really want to go. And I’m planning to go to Morocco. I saw similar patterns in Portugal some months ago, but I think I really want to go to Andalusia. I have been looking at a lot of pictures, and sometimes, when I want to go someplace, I start travelling there in my mind, you know it’s like invoking them. (chuckles)

To be able to watch, we have to surrender to the act of observation. So I think the door is that, a possibility to enter into what we will see if we really see.

The mind is an important place to you, right? The other day when we were talking about your work, you said, “it’s like invoking the magic, but the magic happens in the mind“.

One of your paintings is called “Cruzar del otro lado” (Crossing Over from the Other Side). There is a doorway in it, but the other side remains in the dark. What do you think awaits us there?

I think it’s an entrance to ... maybe to this kind of magic. Somewhere I said, „to be able to watch, we have to surrender to the act of observation“. You need to put all of yourself in there in order to be able to really see, and the other side is maybe when we get to this state of calmness or presence in the moment … in order to be able to see. So maybe that’s what you get when you cross to the other side, you get to be in this place where it’s you as an observer.

I also talked to you about the word „paravisiones“ that was part of a chapter of a Julio Cortazar novel, and the chapter talks about this experience. This narrator is stepping on dry leaves in the street and he finds a special one and takes it to his room and puts it in the lampshade. The next day, a friend comes and pays a lot of attention to the leaf. Then another friend comes and doesn’t even notice the leaf in the lamp but discovers something the narrator didn’t realise. And then the narrator says, „I stay thinking of how many of those leaves I won’t see, me the picker of dry leaves. So many things that are in the air, but these eyes won’t be able to see. For everywhere there’s going to be lamps and leaves and things I won’t see. So that’s when I think of exceptional states in which, for one instant, you guess the leaves and the invisible lamps. They are in an air that’s outside of the space. It’s very simple, every exaltation or depression pushes me to a state that I would call ‘paravisiones’.“

Like this little second in which we are able to see all this, but the next second the epiphany is over.

So I think the door is that, a possibility to enter into what we will see if we really see.

There is a song by David Byrne - „Strange Ritual“, it’s actually about his travels and the rituals he has seen around the world – that starts with the line, „a man sits in a field contemplating his crops, in his mind he travels all over the world“.

Yeah, the mind travels.

Yes, I was talking with my cousin and she likes tarot and witchcraft a lot. I was telling her what I wanted to do - something about magic - and she was like, “but you have nothing to do with magic“. No, it’s not that kind of magic … I mean the magic of being able to see the fluorescence of colours after the rain, the natural magic, the magic of perception.

In a time of environmental crisis, what do you think it means to paint those landscapes with exuberant plants?

Different things. Of course, I love nature and it’s something that worries me a lot. And sometimes it makes me sad to think that probably one day we will only have the photos or the paintings of it. Also I like the possibility of being able to observe and to have nature with you. Maybe a painting is also a good way to be able to think of nature. If I have a painting of a car, I will probably think of a car. But if you have a painting of nature, it lets you have it present in your mind maybe.

How did your painting develope in the last years?

In the last few years I could make a living by painting and be a full-time artist, which is something I really feel very lucky about, I’m very grateful for it. I hope it can continue this way, but sometimes it’s crazy because there are these moments when I get scared about what’s going to happen next month – when I’m finishing this commission or that exhibition is over - and every time the moment I’m about to get really nervous about it, something comes up. And so I take it as a signal that things end up getting together ... working out. But it’s something fluid I think.

Where do you think it will develop in the future?

Wow, that’s a good question. I hope it will develop into the possibility of continued travelling. I loved travelling even before I was painting and then there was a moment I realised I could paint and travel painting. And I hope it continues to take me places physically and emotionally. But it’s very difficult for me to try to imagine where I am going to be in some years, and it always has been something difficult for me. It’s not like I decide that I want to go back there or there, I really don’t know, but I hope it will continue making me travel.

What advice can you give to emerging female artists?

To make community. Getting in touch with people and into interesting things will always bring more cool ideas and opportunities. And also to not stop doing. Sometimes you don’t know why you’re doing it or what’s going to happen about it, but in the end things fit or work. And once I read something like, “it’s a lot of pressure to ask for your art to support you, but it’s better to ask for whatever you do to be able to support you doing art”. It doesn’t matter, I want to paint, and I hope I can always have the economic means to be able to do it. But it is better to know that - I want to paintand then no matter if it’s art or something else that I make a living off, the important thing is that I continue painting.