When looking at a painting, Elena Rivera-Montanes imagines how it sounds, envisioning the environment which surrounds what’s perceptible by sight. With a particular focus on what she describes as ‘transitional spaces’, the viewpoints she paints are often cast through windows or doorways. The scenes are constructed from photos she’s taken on her camera or from family albums. Like her favourite Post-Impressionists, Pierre Bonnard¹ and Edouard Vuillard², she then transposes these familiar sights in paint, relying on the happenstance of her memory to reimagine them with a vibrancy only her brushes can achieve. 

Bonnard³ wrote of paintings ‘examining the inner lives of human beings’. For Elena, her interest lies in painting what surrounds life, drawing attention to transitory intersections of a room, or distant landscapes in awkwardly cropped angles. Although devoid of human presence, her paintings tempt an understanding of a character from their belongings left behind. She paints like a photographer captures an image, using brushes to record passages of time across various sittings. Writer Susan Sontag noted that ‘the photographer’s or painter’s task is to select from the endless possibilities of the world, to preserve it in a frame’, Elena paints a window frame to enact the idea of looking through one in reality. 

She looks to artists who paint seemingly vast landscapes with subtle application. In Milton Avery⁴, Edouard Vuillard⁵ and Lois Dodd’s⁶ paintings of landscapes, pockets of flat colour allow the surrounding details to be more pronounced. Elena will thin down oils in areas to capture the transitioning light on a scene, often applying luminous layers at the outset before they reappear again after more layers are applied. She appreciates painters who apply a mottled application of paint, looking to Vilhelm Hammershøi⁷ or Claude Monet, whose paintings appear to be made up of blotchy daubs of oils. Elena uses an almost pointillist technique to create movement, applying a minutia of fine details using small brushes.

The paintings for ‘As Time Passed' feel at once personal, even diaristic, but also filtered and mediated each painting a microscopic close-up of her everyday life, snapshots which might seem random, but whose very selection reveal her vision. 

Elena Rivera-Montanes, Born 1998, London.
Lives and works in London.

Recent solo and group presentations include: What Now?, 2024, PM/AM Gallery, London, A Quiet Room, A Place in Your Heart, 2024, WOAW Gallery, Singapore, Four-Folds, 2024, Lychee One Gallery, London, The Painted Room, Curated by Caroline Walker, 2023, GRIMM Gallery, Amsterdam.