Pedro Diego Alvarado-Rivera: Embracing the Natural World

Ruiz-Healy Art announces an exhibition of recent works by Pedro Diego Alvarado-Rivera, one of the foremost painters of Mexico. With exclusive international representation of the artist, this is the third solo show put forth by Ruiz-Healy Art in Texas.

The artworks of Alvarado-Rivera are unapologetically pictorial, formal explorations in paint of a focused portion of the visible world. In a contemporary art context where the word “formalism” is often uttered in disparaging tones, Alvarado-Rivera seems to revel in the compositional complexities found in the neat rows of a field of agaves, the repeated arches of an aqueduct receding at an angle into the distance, or the subtle differences in opacity, color, texture, and line of a table full of fruit. Whether in the overview of a tableau or a tightly cropped close-up, his painter’s eye seems to trump the often photographic compositions: the textural differences that convey the play of light over and through the gem-like cells of pomegranate and the variations in their leathery skins, or a stark black ground setting off a table full of watermelons with their variegated green stripes and ovoid forms juxtaposed with the craggy edges of opened pink flesh.

Alvarado-Rivera’s still life paintings are, for the captive viewer, a meditation in form, shape, color, light, and reflection.  Mexican critic and curator Sylvia Navarrete has described his style as "Heavily influenced by Cezanne's approach to light and color, as well as the Mexican Modernist explorations of more primal iconic depiction, Alvarado-Rivera is steeped both in his own tradition and the entire history of painting.”

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