In the late 1950s Manuel Rivera found a form of expression that was all his own, based on the juxtaposition of metal meshes that turned his works into a unique combination of paintings and sculptures with the look of found objects. He abandoned canvas in favour of spatial concerns associated with movement and optical perception. This was a major shift for an artist who up to that point had produced decorative paintings, often on religious themes, and it gave his works a new character, somewhere between the dramatic and the meditative.

From 1962 onwards mirrors became a constant, obsessive concept for Rivera. He did not incorporate them into his works literally but rather as explicit references in dozens of titles, where they seem to have served as a form of personal dedication, as in Mirror for Roxanne (1964) and Mirror for André Breton (1966), or as a poetic way of suggesting imagined images, as in Mirror for a Rainy Afternoon (1965), Mirror for the Eyes of a Tiger (1964) and Mirror for a Banana Blossom (1967, Banco de España Collection). In other cases, the word 'mirror' is qualified by an adjective, as in Amazed Mirror (1971) (also part of the Banco de España Collection), which is the forerunner of other tormented (and literally 'broken') forms of mirror in later works. Both works have a peculiar iridescence that comes from the superimposition of metal meshes. Mirror for a Banana Blossom shows a self-referential containment, while Amazed Mirror seems to be disintegrating drop by drop at the bottom, in a hint of metal melting or surrendering to gravity that makes the composition all the more dramatic.

The recurrent references to quicksilver and its inherent mysteries form a sort of 'gallery of mirrors' in which one can see the influence of trompe l'oeil and the plays on mirrors and backdrops typical of Andalusian Baroque art. This style also used illusory movements, confusing transparencies and optical illusions similar to those found in Rivera's works. Rivera can also be associated with the influence of the tradition of the lattice and the reflections produced by water in the Spanish-Moorish art of his home city of Granada. This became even more true from the 1960s onwards, when he began to attach the metal mesh of his paintings to a wood panel disguised by cloudy, oil-painted forms that hark back to color field painting. He thus created the illusion of water with gently undulating moirés, enabling him also to incorporate colour, which was absent from his earlier experiments with metal mesh.

Carlos Martín