KALEIDOSCOPE
A logbook of conversations with his soul and thoughts: this is how I define William Riera's photographic project, wherein he compiled a daily image taken throughout the year 2023. Through this collection, he translates moods, feelings, reflections, and his daily life using a lens that captures his existence, concerns, lights and shadows, colors, and demons. These elements are mixed in 365 moments, bringing us closer to a human being who is lost, found, and seized[1].
Kaleidoscope is the result of the converging energy of a traveler, a year, and a purpose. Experiences perpetuated with a click and premeditated writings, where each element responds exquisitely to specific spiritual and existential moments, events, memories, his mother, a friend, and his faithful companion: his cat Lucky. It is his way of understanding and living life as a complex amalgamation of ephemeral and endless experiences.
Moreover, this body of work constituted a dialogic development between the photographer and photography, serving as motivation to reflect on how photography, as an artistic medium, influences and directs his daily creative practice. Always in pursuit of self-improvement, self-criticism, self-demand, learning, and the magic it evokes. This is complemented by a consistent accompaniment in his intellectual and photographic exercises for some years: rendering thoughts into writings. The images that compose Kaleidoscope find a hermeneutic finish through various writing ventures: notes on the fly generated in the heat of the photographic creative process; phrases from artists, writers, diverse personalities, or his own, unveiled after a state of introspection, impact, and, why not, even from a REM state.
William Riera aimed to surpass the mere act of "taking pictures," raising the bar higher, a quest that has led him on an arduous path of personal and professional growth. He insisted on embodying a visual and reflective project based on image and thought. This is a rich symphony composed of notes lived from the individuality of its creator, orchestrating for a year his different ways of feeling and understanding death, light, ego, the essence of the being, time, absence, solitude, and loneliness: life and its multiple reflections.
Kaleidoscope is an intimate and keen examination of himself and his surroundings; a transparent dialogue with photography as the artistic manifestation that defines and moves him; the necessary exploration to continue. In the end, to see the way forward, William looks back.
Yenny Hernández, Curator
[1] All the references in italics respond to notes by William Riera himself or to quotes from artists, writers, or personalities he turned to as intellectual complements for his images.