Humberto Rivas, a look at Barcelona in the late seventies

Imaginart Gallery opens on November 25 and 26 at 6:30 p.m. the Humberto Rivas exhibition. The cheerful marginalization, a small format exhibition that brings together 15 portraits of the photographer Humberto Rivas in which the marginal characters of the rogue Barcelona of the late seventies and early eighties stand out.

The exhibition, which can be visited until February 28, 2022, includes 15 portraits of characters who lived in Barcelona in the late seventies and early eighties. Although Humberto Rivas portrayed illustrious people, he also focused on those who lived or gave life in what was then called the Chinatown, the Parallel and the Gothic Quarter of Barcelona. The photographer captured the reality of the low depths of the Catalan capital and in many cases its protagonists are prostitutes, homosexuals, drug addicts, transsexuals, celebrities and transformists. That is why in the images gathered for this exhibition there is the graphic designer América Sánchez; the prostitute Mónica del Raval; Johnson, one of the famous presenters of the Mill; and Violeta la burra, a transformist icon during the Franco regime, to whom Humberto Rivas dedicated an extensive report and perfectly symbolizes marginal Barcelona. In this sense, the title of the show comes from the article that Fernando Trueba dedicated to the documentary of Ventura Pons, Ocaña, an intermittent portrait.

Born in Buenos Aires in 1937, Humberto Rivas settled in Barcelona in 1976, fleeing the Argentine dictatorship and living in Barcelona since 1976. The artist's relationship with our country begins after a happy journey through Europe. 1969 with his wife Maria Helguera, who allowed them to discover Barcelona, ​​the most cosmopolitan city in that period of Dictatorship. Rivas' arrival in Barcelona will mark a before and after in creative photography in our country. He was associated with the art world and particularly with the photographers of the generation of the seventies for whom Rivas, with more or less intensity, became a reference.

His photographs show a passion for portraiture and landscape, mainly urban, and an obsessive concern for the passage of time and the transformations it entails in both people and objects. Rivas's photography proposes a pure and direct presentation of reality that reflects the most intimate details of things: frontal portraits of people and environments, without gesture and without background, dry, sober, black and white portraits; abandoned places, deserted streets, bare walls, empty houses and closed doors. Silence and the imprints of the passage of time surround objects and people in Humberto Rivas' photographs.