Anyone who has visited a church, monastery, abbey, or cathedral will understand that Jaime Rivera's art transforms a Romanesque hermitage into a personal and intimate portrait of Catalan identity, inviting mystical contemplation and aesthetic reflection through the austerity of its resources.
Analogous to the artist in his studio, the hermit of the Middle Ages sought to distance himself from the feudal model to cultivate his own particular vocation in peace, thereby erecting hermitages to the saints in the Pyrenean region of l'Empordà.
Following the constructive style of symmetrical plans, thick walls without ornamentation, semicircular arches, apses, vaults, and robust pillars, artist Jaime Rivera models forty hermitages in clay that evoke Romanesque art as a poetic meeting place for the soul.
