Fragments of spacetime: the endless archives of RV

When I first met RV, we found ourselves entangled in night-long conversations about contemporary art and anarchism, marginality and heroism, surveillance capitalism and the fediverse, the color brown and mummified cats, the smell of mango and Fernando Pessoa.
We soon discovered we shared some friends within the rarely overlapping circles of anarchism and contemporary art, as well as practices of anonymity, pseudonymity, and heteronymity.

Like his conversations, RV's artistic practice vertiginously unfolds as an endless set of matryoshkas, each layer revealing a new web of intertwined narratives, philosophical inquiries, and material histories.
Every piece is a fragment of a constantly evolving puzzle, where the individual works are both autonomous  and part of a larger whole, converging in a broader meditation on identity, memory, and time.

Parallel to this, in his practice, identity is not tied to a singular artist but is instead fluid, multiple, and constructed in relation to others.
RV’s use of pseudonyms and deliberate elusiveness is a strategic act of defiance against the cult of authorship and the commodification of the artist’s identity. By obscuring his personal narrative, he challenges the art world’s obsession with fame, hierarchies, and marketable personas, prioritizing the work itself over the artist’s name and transcending the limits of individual existence.

Through his practice of collecting discarded objects, relational remnants, and marginal narratives, he transforms fragments of spacetime into vessels of meaning, blurring the line between loss and resilience.
Each artifact is also a trace - a relic charged with the emotional residues accumulated from the prior existences of the materials used, as well as from the artist's craftsmanship and labor.

The acts of gathering, collecting, and preserving - his choice of materials and his labor-intensive practice - are in themselves a manifesto of personal responsibility and self-reliance, a practice of ethical care, and a form of resistance to the standard capitalist art workflow, calling into question the very nature of artistic labor, the commodification of the creative process, and the ethics of material consumption.
Over more than two decades, RV’s practice has developed as a radical form of autonomy, creating an impressively large constellation of artworks often assembled in series.
These archives are not static repositories but living and evolving collections of fragmented memories and identities.

In the series on the disposal of hairs and nails, he collects, over the years, samples of hair and nails from
his friends, lovers, former boyfriends, and cats, rearranging them into sacramental repositories; while in the series Najuk (Fragile), he attempts to mend the shattered memories of a past relationship by reassembling the dishes that were broken during his separation and move.
Moreover, in the series the power of dreams / the power of nightmares, he uses sets of collected materials   - coins, computer parts, stones, broken glass, and more - to create masks fitted to his face.
These masks serve as devices of anonymity and protective shields, but they are also agents of displacement and fragmentation of selfhood.

The convergence of human and non-human elements functions as a critical metaphor for hybrid existence, in which self-representation is contingent, mutable, and temporally bound.
All of these artworks become sites of negotiation, inhabiting the fragile intersection of material, gesture, emotion, and thought - a space where perception and experience continually shift between the personal and the collective.

RV’s art practice engages time as a fluid, non-linear force, where relics and residues are constantly transformed into reflections on impermanence. Through the act of reworking and reclaiming fragments, he embraces the idea that identity is not a singular, stable form but a constant flux, shaped by time, memory, and the traces we leave behind. His art is an ontological inquiry into becoming, where the past and present converge, and the self is always in the process of being remade.

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                                                                                Leopreto De Nilson