THE CALLIGRAPHY OF DESTRUCTION: LOURDES DE LA RIVA
Javier Payeras
I cracked open a walnut. Since childhood, I’ve thought of this dried fruit as a miniature brain—sinuous lines revealed the moment its shell breaks, a labyrinth shaped over time by the elements. “Life is an accident without straight lines,” Lourdes de la Riva had told me the previous afternoon in her garden.
Lourdes has one of the most distinctive gazes I’ve ever encountered—serene, cautious, her movements sweeping across everything around her until they settle on a single point, like a lens shifting from a wide shot to being captured by a tiny object. Those imperceptible things that, for her, overflow with meaning. Visiting her studio feels much like entering a laboratory. There are pieces of wood salvaged from the old structure of a house eroded by insects; with extreme meticulousness, she sliced the plank into layers until it became countless filigrees of whimsical forms. My connection is immediate: in those traces I find a silent calligraphy without letters, a spontaneous movement—the labyrinth that shelters the almost microscopic species that build an invisible life, traveling and burrowing their tunnels to live within what feeds and protects them.
The impact of this work, so full of patience, does not require intellectual analysis. There is no victimizing proclamation nor encrypted theoretical redundancy; it fascinates and draws you in precisely because of what María Zambrano demands of poetry: “…what possesses unity possesses everything.”
Sitting at her table, looking outwards, Lourdes speaks to me about the Aesthetics of Destruction. She describes, with simplicity, her discoveries and THAT which is as ineffable as it is extraordinary: the forms ruined by time that leave their mark on what we believe to be impenetrable and solid. She takes from a box what can only be described as treasures, smiling like a child, and shows me a collection of books completely overtaken by moths. I must confess I had never seen destruction like that—scraps, perforated photographs, points that pierced the hardcover from one end to the other… When one believes in beauty, one also believes in destruction: the extremes that touch and recommence. Perhaps nothing is as human as understanding that anything we do is merely thought, for matter will always be prisoner to the ephemeral, to the fleeting; nothing escapes decay.
In an age of algorithms and imposed certainties, coming face to face with the most elemental truth—the premise that we will be devoured by what is smallest, not destroyed by any universal cataclysm—makes our vanity shrink and our attachment to technological advances resemble, more each day, a personality disorder. What is real, then, is observing the calligraphy of destruction drawing strange shadows across surfaces. Lourdes de la Riva has traversed graphic arts, sculpture, painting, and the shifting paths of contemporary creation, but it is perhaps in the observation and recreation of these lines—in fragmentation and labyrinth—that she has found a mirror for her ideas. After speaking with her and listening to her thoughts on the meaning of farewell as renewal, one begins to understand her work more deeply: that simplicity that conceals a complex sensitivity. Thought as a way of adapting to chance, because in seeing what is smallest we discover that we, too, are small, and that throughout our existence we create nothing more than a trace running counter to all our plans. And it is almost certain that, from one moment to the next, everything we begin will remain unfinished—and perhaps it is precisely there that everything we understand as beauty resides.
Cerrito del Carmen, December 30, 2021