Interview with Ernesto Ríos
Centrepoint Collective: Your recent
photographic compositions maintain a very consistent visual code. What can you
tell us about the concept behind the images?
Ernesto Ríos: This series of open and
flexible theme is in continuous expansion and metamorphosis. These images are
captured during long hours of work by different geographies of Latin America,
Europe, Asia and the Middle East. I try to merge, with the help of digital
graphics, linear non-chronological sequences of urban scenes on panoramic
triptychs and polyptics. These initially independent images are intertwined in
many different spaces and times that offer the viewer new meanings, rhythms and
cityscape readings I find in my travels of introspection and work.
I’m addicted to the road, jumping from one
city to another. It cannot be more than a month for me to leave a city. When
not travelling I feel like I’m missing something very important. The creative
itch becomes unbearable and I start a trip but do not know one hundred percent
the final destination. When I go out with my camera get to unknown places and
cultures is when I feel more alive. In those trip is where I invariably find
things that make me wiser, become part of my travel log and my visual
vocabulary. These images unconsciously jump into my eye and usually I try to
catch them through my camera. I see these photos as a travelogue.
CC: What relationship has your paintings with your photographic work and vice versa?
ER: It’s like a very complex love affaire. Sometimes
they are very close and some others they don’t even want to talk to each other.
At times I see them as two totally opposite bodies of work, but generally I
feel they are two entities that are interrelated and inseparable. Both enrich
and complement each other.
CC: Could you describe the evolution that
your work has experimented over time in terms of both aesthetics and concept?
ER: At the age of 12 I took the irrevocable
decision to dedicate my life to the visual arts. In these years of hard work my
creations have changed a lot. It would be a bit hard to explain this process
and summarize it in this conversation, but I can say that my issues are not as
diversified as they used to be. In recent years I have focused much more. For
about six years I have begun to enter the mythological and philosophical idea
of the labyrinth. I love that the labyrinth is a universal theme with endless
readings and interpretations. I am very interested in the symbolic,
metaphorical, psychological, architectural and even the religious and spiritual
archetype that has over 4 000 years of history.
I am currently studying a PhD at RMIT
University in Australia on a scholarship I received for artists from abroad.
The doctorate requires to further defining my statement and my visual content.
Therefore my intention is to further deepen and explore this theme with great
rigor and creative study. I have explored this subject in photography as well
as in painting, video and interactive art and it hasn’t stopped giving me new
ideas and daily variations.
CC: Your work is encoded sometimes in complex geometric shapes, sometimes kaleidoscopic ones. What is the origin of this visual discourse?
ER: Maybe my taste for geometry of tangled
or labyrinthic forms is part of that origin, but it mainly arises from an
observation of nature and its quirky designs what we see in fractals and other
forms. Seeing a spider net in a bar in Melbourne, the leaves of a fern in the
rainforest of Tasmania or the dunes of the desert of northern Mexico are images
that come to mind and that a t some point have motivated me to work.
