Mapi Rivera (Huesca, 1976)
With a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona, Mapi River studied for a postgraduate diploma in Art and Thought at Saint Martins in London. She became a Doctor of Fine Arts with her thesis The Numinous Meaning of Light. The Reconcilement of Creation and Visionary Experience.
She describes herself as a “creator of images”. Her work acts as a channel of communication for spirituality and is linked with a profound personal transformation which has left its mark on her pieces. The yearning for the transcendence of the body through its immanence is a thread running through her entire output, although now in a more intuitive way than in her earlier work.
In her initial photographs she tended to depict herself dressed in clothing she had made herself (Arbres, Mans and Sol, 1998). The images from that time were of markedly hieratic figures clearly stemming from an inclination for the spiritual or sacred; arms raised to the heavens waiting for the arrival of a divine force, a communion with the immaterial.
This urge to make contact with the intangible led the artist, over time, to shed her clothing and free herself of all that covered her body. Works such as Des-co-ser and Pieles de paso from 2003 are the beginning of this tendency towards the nude. She began to show her body free of all superfluity and in connection with nature. It should be noted that her nudes are naked in the immaculate sense, in search of divine purity. It is at this point that she also introduced an element that is vital to her creative output: light and the way in which it brings us closer to divinity. The relationship between her naked body and light, represented as sparks, is accentuated in pieces such as La semilla de la imagen (in collaboration with Ramon Casanova), 2009, Emanaciones de luz (2009) or Nube del no saber (2011).
Mapi Rivera steadily constructs a language of self-portraits in panoramic landscapes where her naked body appears touched by rays of light in wide-open landscapes. One example, amongst others, is the series on show here, Sinapsis from 2014. It is of digitally edited photographs in which the artist represents and explores the relationship between the human body and light, which is to say between the tangible and the intangible or the earthly and the divine. In a mature and reflective manner the artist demonstrates the culmination of an internal process which she refers to as luminous experience, and which results in a great internal clarity which has been transferred to her most recent work.