Rodrigo Bivar: Sal

Galeria Athena is pleased to present the solo exhibition Rodrigo Bivar: Sal.

Sal is the second exhibition that the artist based in São Paulo holds at Galeria Athena, in Botafogo. This time, around 9 new paintings, in large and small formats, will occupy the Sala Casa.

There is a motto that connects the painting on display, which the title itself helps us to decipher. Salt is the base element of the waters of the seas and oceans, and every time we enter them and dry in the sun, the salty particles remain in our bodies, while the water evaporates. Bivar metaphorically explores the way in which the salinity found on the beaches remains in our bodies, dries up, and in this case, they also become images.

Bivar says that “what brings the paintings together is the theme of salt. But my painting does not necessarily have the exuberance of the beach, that beachy pleasure thing. There's a bit of that in some canvases, but there are others that are kind of melancholy in a sense. But salt is, above all, an idea of something that sticks, that stays, that remains in the body, even after we leave the beach. I don't produce these paintings on the beach, but in the studio 400 km from the beach, where these images are made. It's like something that stays, that stays”.

However, despite the beach motto, the images represented by Bivar do not investigate the nature of a landscape painting. The landscape becomes just a background for the portraits – and here the artist distances himself from the classic genre of portrait painting as well –, which occupy the foreground of the oil paint canvases, generally demarcated by a horizon line that separates the spaces of color of the figures represented. In two smaller works, however, the artist explores the portrait of the characters without identifying in them the perspective of the horizon line, placing them in this place/non-place, which, were it not for the set, could make the viewer curious about this imprecise landscape.