Arnaud Rivieren

Waddington Custot Dubai is pleased to announce the first solo show by Dubai-based Belgian sculptor Arnaud Rivieren at the gallery. Entitled Natural Sublime, the exhibition presents three new bodies of work that deepen the artist’s engagement with representing our natural world through painstakingly precise industrial techniques. 

Increasingly known for his series of oversized fruits and vegetables in reflective stainless-steel, Rivieren has built his practice on the twin pillars of respect for nature—by monumentalizing not only fruits and vegetables, but stones and trees—and an extreme attention to the shapes within the non-human realm. 

Swollen to a scale that obliges viewers to assess their own physical presence in the gallery, the fruits and vegetables render nature’s structural complexity. We sense the hidden geometric intricacy of works like the fig sculpture Tyn (2021), the subtle joint-like fixture of the cherry sculptures Karaz (2021), and the curvy regularity of the oversized capsicum Felfel (2021). The works’ smooth reflective surfaces make an encounter with them oddly intimate, as they mirror the gaze back. While each specimen captures a perfect, almost archetypal form of the fruit, such as the shapely apple of Touffaha Hamra (2021), each work bears idiosyncrasies—surface pocks, textural patches, a defiant stem—that distinguish them individually. The play of perishable fruits created in corrosion resistant stainless-steel is emblematic of Rivieren’s sensitive wit. 

Erratics, a series of large and mid-size stones and rocks, sculpted in a darker, less reflective grade of steel, evokes the ancient boulders that have been transported by glaciers and deposited into regions where they differ from native rocks in both scale and composition. Like the fruits and vegetables, the Erratics invite touch and provoke an unusual connection with the viewer. But they are graver, as if their tale were more solemn: they ask us to reckon with them, to stand still and be silent. They are an homage to the truly eternal.

Equally monumental, Rivieren’s series of trees freeze-frames a moment in a long-life cycle. The three works—Oak (2020), Ghaf (2021), and Maritime Pine (2021)—hold nothing extraneous: the architecture of the tree alone matters, and each transmits its unique tangle of life, from trunk to crown. Of all the works in Natural Sublime, these are the least intimate, yet they are the most emphatic. Here, the artist’s deep respect of nature converges with his mastery of both material and technique.