Carlos Rivero (Venezuela, 1953) is a self-taught painter with a long and recognized career in Venezuelan popular painting. Born in Río Tocuyo, located in Lara state, in 1968 he moved to La Guaira. In this city he had the opportunity to interact with the cultural environment, and to participate in the Grupo Artístico Armando Reverón. He worked with the renowned popular painter Feliciano Carvallo, from whom he has an important influence on the pictorial language that he will develop.

The work of Rivero is characterized by a strikingly colorful naive style, compositions full of plant elements, animals and people with a simple life. The manners, historical, religious themes, still lifes and landscapes return us scenes of the Venezuelan landscape, with a primitivist vision and a skilfully represented fabled imaginary. He gathers a repertoire of figures in jungle settings, rich in plants of various shapes and colors. Despite the fact that the entire surface is intervened, it genuinely achieves a delicate harmony throughout the whole. In the words of the critic Perán Erminy “it is a typical example of the horror vacui (horror to the void), which completely saturates the entire surface of his works and makes them particularly attractive”.

With almost fifty years of experience, he has received numerous awards both in Venezuela and abroad. In addition to having an extensive record of exhibitions in cities such as Bogotá, Mexico City, Holland, Los Angeles, London, Miami, New York, Paris, Toronto, among others. Because of his participation in the Artes Gráficas Panamericanas-AGPA program, he is also represented in forty museums in Pan American countries.

Anny Bello