Tania Rivilis

"All art is a work in progress" Rick Rubin

In the expression of her artistic vision, Tania Rivilis explores the limits of the portrait genre. She actualizes the old pictorial tradition in new systems of knowledge, in fundamentally different worldviews. The subject of her research is relationships. Rivilis often refers to a paired or group portrait, where even in a solitary image she accentuates the presence of the silent interlocutor outside the borders of the canvas. She creates portraits in which there is always a reference to another. Because only in another’s gaze, through that prism, can the subject be assembled into a coherent image. Otherwise, a portrait would be an empty shell, merely a set of individual external features. The central image is imbued with life by this reciprocity from outside, as if outside the gaze, outside the touch or coexistence. Without this, the subject would disintegrate, and with it, the entire work would lose its raison d'être. In this way, she makes sense of one of the most traumatic discoveries with which the history of the twentieth century is stitched, a discovery at the intersection of psychoanalysis and semiotics: the lack of a definitively fixed integrity of the human self. In the interconnectedness, she explores the age-old quest for an answer to the question 'Who am I?'