Works on paper by Elena del Rivero

5 Dishcloths

thread and handmade abaca paper, 115 x 79"

"5 Dishcloths" is the first works that I saw of Elina del Rivero before entering her exhibition 'Letters to my mother"

The dishcloths constructed from paper are quite amazing, and to me resemble more of a closeness to origami then to the crumpled up dishcloths usually found in my kitchen. Evenly spaced they create a kind of pattern in the way that they are hung. They remain individual through their own threaded border.

Fragile and delicate in their appearance their is a want when near them to be enveloped by them, so that the folds of the paper would wrap around your body like some form of cover.

There is no risk of wiping water from a plate with these dishcloths, or folding them squarely so that they should hang from the handle of a drawer.

At most, perhaps they resemble the dishcloths sometimes pinched by a corner to be stuck in some plastic contraption stuck to a cupboard door with sticky foam pads.

In Love not part of 'Letters to a Mother'

In the next room, it is truly astonishing as you enter a world where gallery walls do not exist in their repainted pure white walls, but instead where they are hidden by hundreds of pieces of paper lined with small crosses. each cross is no larger the 1cm x 1cm and are stranded in rows across pieces of paper. Some sets of letters on A4 others A5 perhaps some smaller, and hang in blocks like floating grids.

Letters to a Mother was a series that began in 1991. Influenced by Kafkas "Letter to a Father"

For me the covered walls of the gallery, each cross carried with it the implication of words past, given to someone else, misunderstood, becoming a negative, voided in meaning, but at the same time so full in their stitched material body.

There is an obvious repetitiveness across the room of both the way the pages are hung but also of the crosses sewn again and again. Such time, such care, completely patterning an interior space. Echoes of meaningless symbols of crosses, or X's.

In a Press Release from Anthony Meier's Fine Arts, Rivero's letters were said to be an "... obsessive exploration of the letter format as both personal and universal communication."

The repetitive nature of Elena Rivero's 'Letters to a Mother' continues through much of her other work including 'La Cascada' on the left and 'Needle Veil In Big Screen' to the right.

Blackboard

Struggling to Hear....After Ludwig van Beethoven Sonatas, 2005

The scores and notes of a music sheet are no longer legible within this lamda digital c print by Idris Khan.

Lost Beethoven notes lay beneath thick black horizontal lines that seem to float like smoke rings, balanced one on top of another by a thick gray smog.

Traces of the original white paper seep through the grey smog of the dotted bodies and curved tails of music notes.

It's almost as if the music is completely destroyed through the superimposition of the thick black charcoal like lines.

Within the layering, of creating, mixing and covering, there is a history of making sound and also of the loss of sound.

In this way, Khan metaphorically echoes Beethoven's musical makings.