MEMORIES can be curious things. It is a recollection of the past and yet its existence also affects the present and the future. It is not an exaggeration to say that we view life in lenses shaped by our memories.
For Mario de Rivera’s 26th solo exhibit, Palace of Memories, the works serve as both start and end to exhibitions that spanned the course of over 2 decades. As a reprise, it is both refrain and recapitulation. It is both continuation of a past, and its renewal. The works presented take us back to China, a place where the artist has worked in for a significant number of years: informing his work with the material, history, and culture of a civilization that has continued for more than five thousand years.
De Rivera recalls how, as a young man, he took everything in — the Forbidden City, the Imperial Treasures, the stories of the dynasties which formed the sleeping dragon which now awakes and makes the world tremble as it wraps itself around it. The works, steeped in mystery and romance, show us both connection and inspiration, past and future, here and there; conflated in the hazy mist of stream of consciousness.
The images of his works float in mist and gold as if appearing directly from a stream of consciousness. they appear in a seeming snapshot of a flux, a moment frozen in all its eternity. Mario de Rivera’s “Palace Of Memory” opens on September 10, 2019, Tuesday 6pm and runs until September 24, 2019 at Art Lounge Manila, Ground Floor, The Podium 12 ADB Avenue, Ortigas Center, Mandaluyong City.
