Silvia Rodríguez Rivero

Painter, researcher, poet, screenwriter, artistic director, record producer.

Silvia is the daughter of the late musicologist Cuca Rivero and is married to composer and pianist José María Vitier, from this union was born a son, Jose Adrián Vitier.

Graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Economics from the University of La Habana, 1977. She has more than 30 articles and multiple research works of her authorship published in publications on national and international economic issues.

Her literary and musical work is intimately related to that of her husband, Cuban composer and pianist José María Vitier, for whose work she has written song lyrics and produced the musical production of his works for film, concerts and a large number of records.

Her texts for Misa Cubana and Salmo de las Américas stand out from this work, the latter nominated in 2000 for the Latin Grammy Award.

She received the Awards for Best Record Producer at the Cubadisco Awards in 2003 and 2013, and won the Absolute Award for Musicalized Poetry, at the XVII edition of the International NOSSIDE Poetry Award (Italy). She has held 13 personal exhibitions in Cuba.

Her works are in private collections in Europe and in the USA. She belongs to the Registry of Creators and is a member of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC).

Painting
She works primarily in acrylic on canvas, wood or cardboard, enjoys creating volumetric works in old wood and royal palm. She combines the use of various materials in her works, mainly canvas and wood. She likes to call them retablos, although their shape and composition vary.

Her pictorial work contains a powerful musical and poetic charge, her canvases and retablos confirm great creativity.

Some opinions about Silvia R. Rivero's pictorial work

Caribbean modernism, sensuality, symbolism, imagination and intuitive construction. On these bases the Cuban artist structures an exuberant work, of vegetation and femininity embodied in a fantasy transfigured by the warmth of color and the different planes of an imaginary that rests on the canvas as if it were the dream of a legend. There is no doubt that its fluidity and plastic enrichment is a poetic song, a singular illuminating pastoral of densities that are part of the gaze and a fuller expression, whose meanings develop in coordinates that regulate space within other human cartographies.
Gregorio Vigil (Art Critic. Spain / Fragment of criticism of the Exhibition "The Light of the Impossible" . Madrid. November 2015)

In almost all (his paintings) the forest appears. Trees that with their branches interweave a warp of symbolic and discursive relationships, as syntax elements. The forest shelters her characters, serves as camouflage for them, shapes them, but also allows her to spread those brushstrokes of moderate chromaticism with which she recreates a particular atmosphere of expressionist bearing. There is no picturesque intention in them, but rather it is where her stylistic will emerges.

The feminine is a distinctive feature in the whole of these works. With refinement, Venus appears in each creation wrapped in romantic airs. The signs manifest themselves sometimes very directly, and other times more intricately. Grace, motherhood, protective attitude, the encompassing, complex and fruitful thought that projects outward symbolized in her medusa heads, are constant themes. Umbrellas, closed or open, carry their charge of eroticism. The closed ones refer to yang, penetration; the open ones –almost always carrying a couple in their breast– represent yin, the great receiver; and those characters in acrobatic poses or climbing cycles, suggest an encounter, an interest in conquest, a naive game, a display of exaltation.
Janet Ortiz (Fragment of the words to the catalog of the exhibition The Light of the Impossible. September 2015)

Since when did poetry, her poetry, and music, her music, begin to transform into lines, light and color in Silvia? Since when was this vocation germinating in her? Since childhood, since the prenatal limbo, since some previous incarnation? Who knows. Lezama said that the Sforzas of Milan, protectors at some point of Leonardo, had assumed as an attribute the mulberry tree, characterized by "slow development and sudden and flaming flourishing". This gift of Silvia apparently had a parsimonious, quiet, invisible gestation, and suddenly it has flourished in all these magnificent pieces, like the mulberry, in the most sudden and flaming way.
Abel Prieto (Writer, Painter)

"Silvia has brought to each painting a passionate commitment to her truth as a human being; an exercise of loyalty to herself; these painted canvases and boards that she presents before you are the result of an interior dialogue of delicate and intense honesty, in which there is no room for an atom of pretension, and yes a profound and humble gratitude for the grace received."
José María Vitier (Musician and Composer. December 2013)

Although I have gone to countless painters' exhibitions, and I have them as friends like Samuel Feijoo and Cleva Solís, I had never seen one so original in that its procedure is not similar to the usual. I had never seen anything like Silvita's. Each painting was, moreover, an object. A place where one had the sensation, not of looking, but of "being able to enter". (…) It seemed to me that it was a new way of painting. Entering, rather than seeing. All unique, original, unexpected. Your magnificent exhibition!
Fina García – Marruz (Poet and essayist / December 2014)

Silvia R. Rivero / river water: delicacy, docile brushstroke, tact, pictorial backwater that would seem not to awaken from lethargy except in the contradictory, even "dangerous," union with that other species of water, that of the sea.

Of Silvia and her recent works as a visual artist, also centered on the exhaustive, undeniable recreation of the feminine: "a chimerical flight, illusory, toward an "indissoluble and grave kingdom"… that is born from a momentary reverie, from that "bitter innocence"… a spring-riddle that jumps on you surprisingly to place you before unusual questions".
Mylena Suárez (Director of Boloña Editions / May 2014)

"A large part of Silvia R. Rivero's works take up with singular mastery some of the main Marian iconographic programs of Christian art. Perhaps she does so unknowingly, moved perhaps by her ability to observe and the urgent need to pour ideas and emotions into a painting. However, it is worth clarifying that the Virgin is only one of the motifs recreated by Silvia; there are Angel and City, Angel of Twilight and Absences, three pieces that address the functions and characteristics of the Angelic Hierarchies in God's Cosmos. (………) Her Angels act as intermediaries between the human and celestial planes. (…..) divine messengers that fly over Havana, taciturn and brilliant, carrying in their golden wings a message of peace that they will place in the breast of the sleeping."
Maikel José Rodríguez Calviño (Master's in Art Sciences. May 2013)

Exhibitions held
2012
In December 2012 she exhibits her series of acrylics "Angels and Visions" (10 acrylics on cardstock 50 x 70 cm) in the theaters of Las Tuna, Bayamo, Dolores Hall in Santiago de Cuba and Main Theater in Camaguey

In January she expands this series to 15 pieces and exhibits in the gallery of the Covarrubias Hall of the National Theater of La Habana, on the occasion of celebrations for the 400 Years of the Apparition of the Virgin of Charity of El Cobre.

2013
In April, under the title "Angels, Virgins and Visions" she again brings together her work of sacred themes and exhibits in the cities Sancti Spiritus, Cabaiguán, Cienfuegos, Santo Domingo and Santa Clara, accompanying the itinerary of the musical work Misa Cubana to the Virgin of Charity of El Cobre.

From December 26, 2013 to January 24, 2014, she exhibits her personal exhibition "First Glances" at the Carmen Montilla Gallery in the City of La Habana.

2014
In June she exhibits part of her work in wood in Santa Clara at the Mejunje Gallery and in the Cathedral of Remedios.

From December 19 to January 19, she exhibits her personal exhibition Secrets of Wood, at the Carmen Montilla gallery, of the office of the historian of La Habana.

2015
She presents the exhibition "Secret Havana" during the month of February in the exhibition space of the Parque Central Hotel.

She presents in Madrid the personal exhibition "The Light of the Impossible" at the Gallery of the Puerta de Toledo Cultural Center and in Lisbon at the "Palacio de Foz".

2016
She presents the exhibition The Kingdom of Another World at the Cultural Center and Missionary Animation San Antonio María Claret, Santiago de Cuba.

She performs with composer and pianist José María Vitier and visual artist José Adrián Vitier at the Fábrica de Arte Cubano, La Habana.

Musicalized texts
Illusion of Reality (Silvia Rodríguez Rivero - José María Vitier)
Game of Love (Silvia Rodríguez Rivero - José María Vitier)
The Deceptive Havana (Silvia Rodríguez Rivero - José María Vitier)
Wrong Couples (Silvia Rodríguez Rivero - José María Vitier)
Prayer to the Virgin of El Cobre (Silvia Rodríguez Rivero - José María Vitier)
Perhaps it Was Yesterday (Silvia Rodríguez Rivero - José María Vitier)
Once an Angel (Silvia Rodríguez Rivero - José María Vitier)
A Paradise Under the Stars (Silvia Rodríguez Rivero - José María Vitier).

Film and Songs
With her songs, she has participated in the soundtrack of Cuban and foreign films. She made her debut in Salón México, a version of the original by Indio Fernández based on a story by Cuban Eliseo Alberto Diego.

For the film A Paradise Under the Stars, by Gerardo Chijona, she composed from son music to romantic songs. One of them, Game of Love, she remembers with all the intensity of a relic.

Her sensitivity to music comes from her mother, Cuca Rivero, one of the great teachers of choral education in Cuba.

Awards
She has received several national and international awards for her work as a record producer, among them: she was nominated for the Latin Grammy Award for the production of "Salmo de las Américas", best symphonic music CD in 2000; she received the Award for Best Record Producer at the Cubadisco Award in 2003, 2013 and obtained the Absolute Award for Musicalized Poetry, at the XVII edition of the International NOSSIDE Poetry Award (Italy).