Digital texts
Lido Rico. The Revelation
This exhibition aims to serve as a catalyst for new emotions through the dialogue between contemporary art and the museum’s permanent exposition.
Starting from the context of the building of the Art Museum RIGA BOURSE, which offers a particular journey through history, extraordinary possibilities for dialogue and adaptation of contemporary art to the environment are created, enabling a sensory experience for the visitor whose impression expands into unimagined places. The singularity of this synergy projects the birth of a new way of looking at the past through the present, since, throughout the journey across the different rooms of the permanent collection, what could be considered a temporal anomaly ultimately becomes a fascinating encounter filled with unexpected surprises.
We will begin with the welcome of the main character, who will serve as the guiding thread of our journey: the figure of the gondolier. He will be the host who guides us through the different spaces of the museum from the very beginning of our visit. Absorbed in thought, he receives us in the building’s courtyard, attempting to decipher the reason behind that fragmented boat suspended from the glass ceiling. From this point onwards, a reinterpretation and accompaniment throughout the collection’s itinerary will emerge, offering the viewer a new perspective.
The Revelation also speaks to us of that fundamental moment in existence: childhood. It is there that the seed of what a person will become in adulthood is planted; for this reason, it becomes the main driving force of the exhibition discourse. In this sense, the viewer will immediately understand that those children who as if by chance inhabit the space, interacting both among themselves and with the different pieces of the permanent collection, generate a friction that conveys a sense of freshness and helps to rewrite that memory which, in the form of paintings and sculptures, covers the museum space.
This exhibition becomes an affirmation that introduces the viewer into a magical adventure, because by returning them to their childhood, it encourages the need to learn to look at history in a different way: one in which eyes filled with innocence are capable of creating a miracle.
Text by artist Lidó Rico and curator Míriam Huéscar
Bio
LIDÓ RICO (YECLA, SPAIN, 1968)
Full academic member of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de Santa María de la Arrixaca de Murcia (2026), Honorary Doctor of the Mexican Institute of Victimology (2023), Lidó Rico is one of the most visible representatives of Spanish contemporary art today.
His artistic career was established early. After receiving the Murcia Joven Painting Prize in 1989, he was selected in 1992 to create the exterior sculpture for the Murcia Pavilion at Expo ’92 in Seville. Since then, he has maintained a continuous career, holding more than one hundred solo exhibitions across multiple countries.
In 1997, he participated in the International Salon of Visual Arts in Medellín, Colombia; in 2001, he received an Honourable Mention at the 6th International Biennial of Drawing and Graphic Arts in Győr, Hungary; and in 2005, he represented Spain at the 23rd Alexandria Biennale in Egypt, where he won the Grand Prize. This year, he will be one of the participating artists at the 6th International Biennale of Casablanca, Morocco.
His work is part of prominent public and private collections, including the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS), the Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno (IVAM), the Basque Museum of Contemporary Art (ARTIUM), Alexandria Museum of Modern Art (Egypt), the Pérez Simón Collection (Mexico), the ACACIA Collection (Turin, Italy), the Mssokhan Foundation (Japan), the Miloud Chaabi Collection (Morocco), and the Rak Art Foundation (United Arab Emirates), the Bank of Spain, la Caixa Collection. It is also held in notable private collections such as the Pilar Citoler Collection and the Ernesto Ventós Collection.
1st Floor
Gondolier
2026
Polyester resin
I always knew that the mishap suffered by that gondola had nothing to do with the stories told about the careless nocturnal scrape it endured against the Rialto Bridge. For I was certain that the true cause of its destruction had been the impact of some accursed piece of horseshoe iron. Although gossip placed the murderous weapon lodged in the facade of some building, I continued my dives into the canal for decades until, at last, I managed to recover the damned horseshoe. And despite having spent centuries submerged beneath the darkest waters, its metal, still burning hot, smelled of horses stripped bare by abrupt pavements, and of a rusted despotism that galloped across my fingers with the indecent touch of some uncontrollable frustration.
The Dream of Lielais Kristaps
2026
Polyester resin and metal
On that stormy night, the seat of my enormous shoulders saved that child’s life from the uncontrollable currents of the Daugava. “Let me keep your little shoes inside the sturdy satchel I carry upon my back,” I told him, “that way they will remain dry when we cross to the other side of the river.”
As we crossed, unexpected whirlwinds forced me to press his knees tightly against my chest to regain my balance. It was then that I perceived not only that the child’s weight was growing heavier by the moment, but also that the texture of his skeletal structure was changing in nature, transforming his legs into something resembling antlers.
Upon reaching the opposite shore, and with the majestic movement of a stag, the boy released himself from my neck, miraculously leaping over my head before touching the ground. “Keep my shoes,” he said to me, “in the world where dreams are forged, where I am going, I will no longer need them.”
With the silent and elegant gait of the most seasoned of creatures, the presence of that small being disappeared among the bushes. At that instant, upon feeling an unusual weight within the satchel, I understood the generosity of that gift, for the wealth granted to me by the golden glow of those tiny shoes would suffice to lay the foundations of the dreamed city.
Totem: Kapu svētki
2026
Polyester resin and metal
I dreamed myself freed from the servitude of the Tsarist Empire, searching for consecrated places where I might attain that longed-for prosperity so dearly needed by a clear conscience. There, I listened to the music of ancient festivals where social changes were danced into being, obliterating historical traumas and raising smiles with every leap.
I coveted the solemn silence of cemetery walls because, beneath the shelter of their damp shadows, I could bury any suspicion of retinal art. I imagined myself naked and free, in the midst of a ready-made field, attended by invisible bottles of sanity.
Circuits
2016
Polyester resin and wheels
There are forms that herald growth, evolution, and constant transformation. Ancestral spirals that speak of the mysterious balance between the inner and the outer. There are helices where history manifests itself as a continuous becoming that knows nothing of braking, for within it occur people and events that flow without ever knowing justice or repose.
There are hands that gripped the wheels of their present with such force that the imprint of their tires succeeded in tracing authentic highways of wisdom.
There are hands that emerge and disappear, enchanted hands that the current of becoming pushes onward one after another, transforming the light of their wisdom into a time of perpetual remembrance.
The Barometer
2026
Polyester resin, wood, glass, and metal
Within that inherited legacy that destiny crossed into my life, there was one object that cried out above all others: “Thousands of eyes have searched within me for answers,” proclaimed its voice, unafraid of being heard. The instant I touched it, I understood there was no falsehood in those words, for the unsettling mercury-blue of its veins struck mercilessly through my being, transporting me to that singular and miraculous place where the most relentless certainties are capable of germinating.
“Beyond measuring atmospheric pressure,” it whispered to me, “my extraordinary capacities reach much further; you need only look upon me with the purity granted by kindness, and you shall decipher the weight of the air that floods your gospel of uncertainties.”
At once, I perceived that the high and low pressures of the instability tormenting me vanished, transforming my soul toward that strange place whose sky possesses not a single edge.
The Mooring
2024
Polyester resin and iron
Do not speak to me of chains when these bones already are. Speak to me instead of light, of liberation, and of the power bestowed by experience. Do not impose, for the pale green bitterness of supplication deserves to be banished from the face of the Earth.
The Silenced
2026
Polyester resin and zippers
Premeditated refusals are heard upon crossing the shore, swelling in answer to the question of whether the city is complete; thus it shall never be buried beneath rivers of legend. There are skies that unzip themselves beneath the blow of unforeseen lightning, places that answer with thunderous justice upon hearing the whisper of the unrevealed.
There are skies where the seed of intimidation is buried deep within the vast necropolises of never again; it is there that sterile infamy is banished from memory, where intolerance yellows and languishes until it withers away.
There are silenced voices that disfigured fanaticisms, silent brushes that painted the screams from the other side, stealthful chisels that struck against stones of certainty, and strings that suffered the wound of a censored strum.
There exist silenced pasts so laden with untold things that the weight of their revelation would cover all the oceans of the Earth, leaving no room for a single merchant vessel.
3rd Floor
Lāčplēsis
2024
Polyester resin
You need not have been born from the womb of a she-bear, because on the day you learn to hear the past, a torrent of energy will course through your veins, a superhuman strength that can be bestowed only by pure knowledge.
And though the world may be filled with deaf black knights eager to challenge one another to duels, you will never again fear speaking of your mother’s animal nature. Nor will you dread undergoing any transformation, for everything that has been heard dwells within that mysterious and impregnable hangar, impossible to damage, where the immaterial fluids of the soul grow.
Miezis Path
2025
Polyester resin, wood and metal
Open the gates and let the road of green hope spill forth, for along the course of innocent childhood we find the only religion that humankind truly needs. Only they are capable of following the light of the generous path traced by old Miezis.
Though many believe that childhood is lacking in attributes, reality is quite the opposite, for it is during that first stage of life that our benevolent nature reveals a humanity that maturity later ruins.
Miezis is more than the legend of an ancient guardian spirit of barley and harvests, for the radiance of his beacon gives us strength to remain upon the pious path of compassion. Beyond his verdant trail, existence is stained by a darkness called ruin.
The Sarcophagus
2026
Polyester resin and gauze bandage
Upon seeing those Neo-Gothic doors, I imagined that inside I would find the vault destined to safeguard the wealth amassed by the city’s most notable businessmen. Yet nothing could have been further from the truth, for when I crossed their threshold, I discovered an Egyptian treasure whose liturgy made every one of my bones tremble and cry out.
Ceramics, ritual palettes, alabaster vessels, cosmetic jars, scarabs, bronze deities, and sacred animals surrounded a beautiful wooden sarcophagus whose mummy wasted no time in confessing that it needed my help.
When they embalmed and wrapped me, its words echoed through the deepest chambers of my conscience: they had run out of linen before they could finish protecting my heart from the grandeur of all the affection that Pharaoh Queen had bestowed upon it on the banks of the Nile.
“I have been waiting for this moment for thousands of years,” it continued to whisper to me. “All I need from you is a few more yards of bandage so that I may bind the infinite love of that woman, for it continues to grow within me without measure or mercy. If you manage to cover it, perhaps then Anubis will show compassion and understand that the purity of a feeling is so eternal that it may allow itself to soar far above immortality itself.”
The Tribune
2018
Polyester resin and metal
I lend you my steps so that you may climb into these universes of silence and memory. Here, in these mysterious quarries where bygone times stain the paradise of their walls, you will discover that within the whiteness of their marble skin there exists no law other than that dictated by tenderness. For when the body wishes to remain, the instinct of survival is capable only of crying out certainty.
4th Floor
The Revelation
2026
Polyester resin
Without expecting it, that visit to the museum would forever change the way I understood life. The reason lay in two small paintings I happened upon while wandering through its corridors. I could not explain why, for the strokes drawn across their dark canvases were not particularly skilful. Yet I understood that those pale foregrounds, drowning beneath unfathomable blacks, were responsible for undermining my reality in order to gift me another life.
When something indescribable seized my feet before them, I not only became aware that my body, along with the rest of the gallery, was disappearing, but also that the Earth itself had ceased to turn. Never before had I experienced anything like it. Chills made me feel inside and outside, small and immense at once; I could hear them, smell them, and taste them. They carried me so far away that I was never able to gather my pieces again, for they had surpassed the speed of light.
The Monks of Saint John
2018
Polyester resin, flies, and paper collage
Once a year, the miracle of the flies would occur. That morning, without warning, the remains of thousands of them would carpet almost the entire floor of the studio. I never found any cause or explanation for why such a thing happened.
Yet the incident ceased to trouble me when, after encapsulating some of them, they managed to come back to life and reveal their secret.
“We are the only insects,” they said, “who, owing to our tiny size, can enter through the small opening left by the two medieval monks who chose to wall themselves in. Through it we bring them sustenance, and thanks to the movement of the quills with which they write their blessings, we find the oxygen and breath needed to carry out our task.”
Vitruvius
2026
Polyester resin
I dreamed myself among animals, plates, and strange porcelain beings. I dreamed myself naked, standing before bewildering glazed eyes that conveyed what their sealed ceramic lips found impossible to express.
Our deepest gratitude for having dared to cross the glass, the gaze of one of those small and motionless figures seemed to say. We are accustomed to being the ones observed, and we have never had the opportunity to know anything of your kind.
Yet, in truth, we feel a certain bitterness as we look upon you, for we can see that you are unprotected. We do not know who your artisan creator may be, but they ought to consider completing your form with a generous coating of the finest glaze. Then time would pass you by without leaving its mark, just as it does with us, because, as you see us now, so we emerged from the kiln centuries ago.
In the Corners of Porcelain
2026
Polyester resin, rope and metal
Please help me find the child who slipped into the river from my arms, murmured that ceramic image of a woman as I passed beside her. After losing him, a flood of tears drained the veins of my porcelain body, swelling it until it became what you see now. Help me find him by shouting his name with me, with the full weight of your throat, for such sweetness could never truly have been swallowed by any current. I need to return to the joy of that motherhood that pressed him against its heart.
Help me, please. Help me cry out his absence with such force that the weight of your decibels clears the riverbank, leaving not a single corner deaf.
Staburadze: the Maiden of the Rock
2026
Polyester resin and stone
Upon reaching the cliff, I felt my feet begin to tremble as a murmur rising from the earth started to crawl over me, like the most unctuous of serpents, until it found refuge within my ears. a shiver ran violently through my entire body when it began to whisper to me the story of that place.
—This land upon which you now stand —it said— was forged from the salt of the sorrowful sobs of the deepest lament. Those days of futile waiting for the return of my beloved made me understand that the murderous river you now behold ended up suffocating forever all that gave meaning to my existence. And though, at first glance, I may seem like an enchanted rock speaking words into the air, I remain the most deeply enamoured maiden you shall ever encounter. Look now upon the endless flow of that spring and do not be deceived, for it is not water that pours from it: they are my tears reciting eternal love.
Light Bulbs
1996
Polyester resin, light bulb, and paper collage
There are encapsulated landscapes that, despite having
come into being many decades ago, continue to breathe a kind of continuous present, for time flees in terror before their intensity.
There are stories impossible to melt down, narratives that inhabit spaces where a mantle of wonder settled forever inside frozen light bulbs transformed into canvases through the surgical touch of a past too powerful to forget.
The Thieves of Time
2026
Polyester resin, metal, and wood
I only needed to dissolve my identity in order to enter the entrails of time. There, I was able to understand the systole and diastole of its elusive fate. It was then, upon touching its strange pendular heart, that I began to summon answers.
As its cogwheels ground against my fingers the incredible stories of hands that once marked the vital rhythm of generations, the chains of its carillon etched upon my skin the most mysterious of tattoos. That sudden and obstinate wound made me understand the full meaning of the word fascination because, through it, I was able to read and behold chronicles that carried my body toward unimaginable places, events that froze the flesh while raising every hair upon it, biographies that dazzled the soul, and even legends that the oldest clocks recounted through tolling chimes in an enigmatic Morse code from the remoteness of other palaces.
The Lovers
2026
Polyester resin , wood, oil on canvas
On that distant Saturday night in 1855, the planets ceased to rotate because they had learned how to dance. That was the day I understood that life multiplied beyond measure because, among the many people attending the inauguration of that Venetian Renaissance palace, destiny saw fit to place that woman before me. I did not care about the excessive cold that trespassed into every last corner of the building, nor did I need to add more incandescence to the defeated candles suspended from the ceiling, for the honeyed glow of her gaze managed, within tenths of a second, to transport my soul toward an indescribable otherworldly light.
We both understood that, from that day onward, nothing and no one would ever succeed in separating us, and although, over the years, the cursed tuberculosis managed to tear me away from her presence, it never succeeded in stealing from me the greatness she had gifted to my heart.
Today, as every anniversary, while I lower your portrait and place it upon your rocking chair before me, so that I may look into your eyes as I whisper that poetry collection which once made us tremble, a sudden exhalation petrified my soul upon sensing, for the first time, that the magnitude of an absence can create chambers within the flesh; there, devastation annihilates every silence.
Tightrope Walkers
2026
Polyester resin and cotton
Neither old age nor death can defeat us, because amidst the counterweights squandered by the balance of history, we managed to stretch and walk upon cables now interwoven with your present. And no, we are not afraid of falling, because within your gaze dwells the balancing pole that keeps us from collapse.
Let us play with the ropes of the past; it was we, long before you were born, who practiced a kind of magic whose immense burden of truth now hangs before you upon these walls. And no, these are not brushstrokes but memory. Nor are they innocent oil testimonies upon discreet canvases; they are far, far more.
Now listen, without fear, to the murmur of what unfolds within these paintings; perhaps within them you will find the cry of an existence so similar to your own that it may dislocate your bones as you contemplate your own soul.
Santísima
2017
Polyester resin
Some paintings took advantage of the silence of the night to unpaint themselves and take for a stroll the absorbed and weary oil that inhabited their canvases. In an instant, certain yellowish hues blushed upon meeting for the first time some inconceivable violets with whom they had shared centuries, unaware until that very moment of their existence. Other greenish shades could scarcely believe the browns that emerged when caressed by blood-red tones that ached at the mere sight of them.
When several bluish hues attempted to flee through the windows, seduced by the dark turquoise of the night, the painter’s wise hand tightened the threads of its colours and said: —Do not seek to desert this canvas, nor this palette, for together you form a beautiful story; apart, you are nothing more than forgotten and sorrowful drops of oil.
The Secret of Sandvika
2026
Polyester resin and artificial snow
I crossed deserts, borders, and winters in search of the answer that the soul of my last marriage had endured for years. Never would I have imagined that it would be in that tiny Nordic town, brought to the ground by an overwhelming exhaustion upon its soft white blanket, that I would discover the key that would dispel every doubt.
“In the first wooden house with a purple facade that you see upon crossing the bridge,” whispered the snow that enveloped and dusted my entire body, “you will find the person who cost you both so many sleepless nights. There lives your sixth stepson. Go and see him, and upon your return, tell your dear Alice that her offspring knows nothing of the cold, for his fertile seed has succeeded in creating one of the happiest families in Norway.”
The Sentinel
2026
Polyester resin
Within the marble of your white skin I found all the refuge that my soul, still unfinished, needed. When I heard a mysterious scratching from inside the drawer where I had kept the fingers you gifted me, a miracle occurred, for when I opened it, a tiny maple tree cast upon me the most beautiful gaze that nature is capable of inventing.