Critical Texts
FRANCISCO RIVAS "BRUT LIFE"
by Pedro Vaz
Link: https://www.artecapital.net/snapshot-99-francisco-rivas
On November 4th, the Centro de Artes de Ponte de Sôr inaugurated Brut Life, the new solo exhibition by Venezuelan artist Francisco Rivas, currently based in Portugal. The show brings together a new series in which the artist works around the idea of the raw in everyday life. This theme unfolds through a body of works that reconsider how the aesthetics of the “brut” can confront the dualities of the contemporary world—embracing the incomplete as something inherently human in an age where digital perception increasingly dominates the textures of the visual field.
In a dialogue between memory and his pictorial universe, the exhibition seeks to express that incompleteness naturally belongs to human perception.
Born in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1982, Francisco Rivas has lived in Portugal for over ten years. From an early age, he showed an interest in the visual arts and began painting as a teenager. He studied Fine Arts at the Central University of Venezuela and later pursued Design and Motion Graphics. In 2020, he exhibited for the first time at MAAT — Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (Lisbon), within the Interstício initiative, and in 2021 he participated in the Venezuela Art Fair in New York. He is currently an artist-in-residence at Art Room, Lisbon, where he also keeps his studio.
Before the opening of Brut Life, I interviewed the artist to explore the relationship between his aesthetic universe and his work. As part of the exhibition, Rivas created a video artwork that merges the interview with small exercises of visual mutation based on models of the original works presented in Brut Life.
Pedro Vaz: How was the osmose between your work and the space at the Centro de Artes e Cultura de Ponte de Sôr conceived?
Francisco Rivas: The starting point for this project was an expansion of my previous exhibition, which took place at another cultural center (Centro Cultural John dos Passos — Madeira). This project also became an expansion of my brutalist aesthetic. I was invited by the Centro de Artes de Ponte de Sôr to create another artistic project in the region, and that invitation actually gave birth to Brut Life. Initially, Brut Life was conceived as a project about the rawness of the everyday: a series of studies and research notes I’ve been developing since the beginning of this year with the support of programmers, curators, and the production team at the Cultural Center.
The institution saw in me a way of expressing and producing art on a large scale, and they challenged me to transform a room that was originally dedicated to music into an exhibition hall — a rather opaque space. They believed I could bring more color and organic expression to it, and from that challenge came their invitation. These are new formats I’ve been exploring on a large scale — this is the first time I’ve created works that expand up to 6 meters wide by 2 meters high — and that’s a very important step in my artistic career.
PV: What drives the balance between your memories and your pictorial universe?
FR: My main motivation, I would say, is the tension between these two worlds — my origins and where I find myself now. That duality has become the ground I stand on. It’s a daily struggle that I transform and express in a universal language — through music, songs, architecture, urban landscapes, and a whole collection of memories that I translate into a universal language within this exhibition.
Francisco Rivas, Casa con piscina en Valle Arriba, 2023.
Acrylic and oil on canvas, 150 × 150 cm.
PV: How do you think the naïf elements in your paintings allow the adult viewer to reconnect with their own past?
FR: The naïf is a kind of resilience — an adult gaze that could just as well be that of a child standing before my work. Between those two perspectives lies my point of view. A cartoon or a childhood moment — eating ice cream, reading comics — those small ecstasies we enjoyed can be felt when facing my paintings. Many viewers, especially adults, reinvent new stories through my work. So yes, I think resilience is an essential point.
PV: What tools do you use to measure the distance between your aesthetic and the viewer’s perception?
FR: My main tools are color and the disproportion of objects. I’m interested in how people can relive new stories from within their own lives through my paintings. Each piece becomes a filter through which viewers re-experience their own memories — and, in that sense, they complete the work for me.
Francisco Rivas, Amigos en el juego no!, 2023.
Acrylic, oil and spray on canvas, 150 × 150 cm.
PV: In what way can the brutalist aesthetic answer the questions of the world?
FR: I would say that to embrace the incomplete is to be human. Today we live in a digital world — artificial intelligence shows us only the final, calculated result. We’ve lost the patience to appreciate a work, its texture, the way it feels, because everything has become digital. That’s why I believe it’s so important to experience a work — especially one with a raw aesthetic — because it exposes the skeleton of its making. It reveals its path, its veins, its mistakes, its layers. And that’s something we need to reflect on as human beings: incompleteness is part of perception.
Pedro Vaz has been organizing exhibitions and performances in Coimbra since 2014. Between 2013 and 2018, he completed a BA and MA in Artistic Studies at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Coimbra. He is currently a PhD candidate in Arts and Mediations at NOVA University’s FCSH and works as an independent curator through Coletivo Gambuzino, founded with Emanuela Boccia in 2023.