Touching Being
To shape, to paint, to sing, to touch.
I seek life in matter, breath in color, trace in gesture.
An encounter between my body, the support, and the colored material – a dance of three, letting what emerges.
The material carries its own voice, its memory, its taste.
My body becomes brush; my breath attunes itself to the matter.
The moment of creation is a passage — a state of gentle trance in which something passes through me.
I do not seek beauty; I seek the living, the right, and that which escapes — what questions, unsettles, sets in motion.
My gesture may remember an older gesture — that of a hand on a rock face, of a child touching a window to say: I am here.
Binding opposites: the sacred and the profane, softness and strength, life in transformation.
Speaking of cycles, of the body, of time, of the meaning hidden in simple things.
Sometimes painting becomes performance, sometimes video, sometimes photography.
Everything comes from the same place: the desire to be there, whole, in matter and in the world.
I am nature
— Riborg
Blackberry Performance
Paris 2024
Photo credit: Amir Habibi
Oval of tenderness
Kisses with painted lips on hydrangea-petal paper made by my hand, 2024 (Dimensions: 21*30 cm)
Multidisciplinary, Riborg's work is nourished by duplicité: that of her dual Norwegian and French culture, and by the fertile back-and-forth between painting and singing that she practices, with as its guiding thread an intrinsic rhythm, lived through to its embodiment in her pictorial and performative gesture.
She works primarily with this encounter between her body and supports—paper and canvas, which she makes, or else stitches and nails.
From Nature, she extracts elements that themselves become supports, or the drawn pigment retracing her gestures.
Her work, by drawing its inspiration from a movement of return toward Nature, thus distances itself from all culture, while inscribing itself in the continuity of a type of primitive renewal practiced by Indigenous peoples.
This sensory ensemble is in constant mutation, like the Nature in which she has planted her studio.
— Julie Borgeaud
Art historian, curator and author