In the 1960s Humberto Rivas began an exploration of urban space; particularly of those spaces that carry the footprint of human action—architecture, streets, the interiors of homes, intimate spaces, and furniture—in an extensive series of photographs that he developed over the course of many years and whose outstanding feature is the complete absence of the human figure.

Although this corpus also includes images in color, it is mostly comprised of black and white photographs that incorporate a play on light and chiaroscuro reminiscent of a certain pictorial tradition related to painters such as Rembrandt, and Sven Nykvist’s— Ingmar Bergman’s cinematographer who Rivas greatly admired—treatment of light. This trait is particularly noticeable in his later work in which the artist accentuated the densities and gradients of black. Likewise, there is also an artistic search that tends toward abstraction within this ensemble of images and is embodied in Rivas’s work on light and his articulation of volumes.

Barcelona, a photograph from 1980, is a perfect example of the values Rivas sought out and captured with his camera during his urban explorations. The different surfaces that make up the image offer a juxtaposition of textures and hues accentuating concepts such as trace, remains, fragment, solitude, and resonant temporality.