Agustín Nicolás Rivero
- Anna Lilli Garai
- Jan 27
- 3 min read
Agustín Nicolás Rivero is a Colombian artist based in Bogotá who works with textiles, drawing, and installation. He spends long hours tying, sewing, and building surfaces from the same small action repeated again and again. The rhythm of the hand is visible in the finished pieces, from the density of the knots to the way light passes through the layers. His pieces come together over many hours of steady, patient work.
Q: What first drew you to using small gestures like knotting, sewing, and felting in your work?
A: My engagement with small gestures emerged through a long-term exploration of textiles, often working alongside artisans in rural communities across Colombia and Latin America. At first, I positioned myself as a silent observer, watching how a single action was repeated over extended periods of time. That repetition felt almost like a mantra, performed through the hands, where time seemed to slow down and become palpable. This way of working resonated deeply with my earlier practice in drawing.
My drawings are built through the repetition of a simple gesture—lines, circles, or marks sustained over many hours. In both drawing and textile processes, repetition becomes a method for the condensation of time into texture, where repeated gestures accumulate memory within the material. Over time, this led me to understand texture as a surface where time can condense: where duration, memory, and labor accumulate and become physically embedded in the material. Small gestures are not merely technical decisions, but a way of allowing time to take form.
Q: How do you decide how tight or loose a surface should feel?
A: I think of tension as a way of measuring time and fragility. A tight surface suggests control, insistence, and resistance, while a looser one allows for vulnerability, collapse, and uncertainty. I don’t decide this intellectually beforehand; it emerges through the process, by listening to the material and responding to its limits. The balance between tightness and looseness reflects a constant negotiation between structure and failure, between holding and letting go. In that sense, the surface becomes a record of that negotiation rather than a fixed decision. The surface finds its own tension through the act of making, somewhere between insistence and collapse.
Q: Your pieces move between lightness and physical weight. What do you focus on when finding that balance?
A: I often think about felting as a way to understand this balance. Felt is a non-woven textile, without warp or weft, made of loose fibers that gradually bind together through pressure, moisture, and time. What begins as something light and dispersed slowly becomes dense and physically present. I approach my work in a similar way. Lightness exists at the beginning, in what is fragile, open, or unresolved. Weight emerges through the accumulation of gestures, time, and repetition. The balance appears when that accumulation becomes evident—when something that once felt intangible starts to carry presence and gravity.
Q: Fragility and persistence both appear in your work. How do you sense which one is leading as a piece develops?
A: I understand fragility and persistence as forces that are always present at the same time. Fragility shows itself in moments of exposure, when the material is close to failing or unraveling. Persistence appears through repetition, through the insistence of returning to the same gesture again and again. As a piece develops, I don’t try to decide which one should lead. I pay attention to how the material responds. The work reveals its direction through that tension, allowing one force to momentarily surface without eliminating the other.
Q: Viewers activate shadows and layers as they move around your installations. How do you think about their presence while you're building a work?
A: I think about the viewer as an active presence whose movement continuously alters the work. Light, shadows, and layers shift as bodies move through the space, making perception unstable rather than fixed. I’m particularly interested in moments when more than one viewer is present. A stationary viewer might observe another body entering the installation, gradually disappearing between the panels, becoming fragmented by shadows and distance. That slow vanishing transforms the work into a temporal experience, where presence turns into absence, almost like a memory fading as it is being formed.
Q: What directions or questions are you most interested in exploring next?
A: I’m interested in continuing to explore different forms of plasticity and material transformation, especially in relation to time and the body. I’m drawn to questions around how time is experienced at different scales—some perceptible through human labor and duration, others operating beyond our immediate sensory limits. Alongside my textile practice, I’m increasingly exploring sculptural techniques such as ceramics and wood carving. These processes allow me to think about time not only as something accumulated through repetition, but also as something shaped through pressure, erosion, and resistance.
