The virtual exhibition Spheres of Influence offers an introduction to Rimassa’s extensive and varied body of work. While the celestial spheres of the Sun and the Moon are recurrent compositional elements in his paintings and drawings, the forms also serve as metaphor for the diverse ideas and styles that merge in Rimassa’s work in the earthly realm.[1] They meld local subjects with flat and modernist forms of representation or infinite variations of linear and intuitive perspective.[2] These diverse approaches anchor his work in time, recording the colonial past and the aesthetic of its architectural vestiges in the present.[3] At other times they challenge that very concept capturing the timelessness of a remote geography.[4]

The implicit relationship of the Sun and the Moon with the Earth heightens the sense of a vast and intriguing place from which the artist observes, and which he passionately conveys.[5] Rimassa offers the viewer either the path to imaginary journeys or bits of recognizable colonial towns and lonely streets that are rapidly disappearing in Bolivia, and which semblance we recognize the keen eye and virtuosic hand of the architect.[6]

Despite the trace of a feeling of longing that capturing the mix of colonial and indigenous past evokes in many of Rimassa’s townscapes, there is no suffering or romance, but a drama that is played with great intensity, especially by color and by the energy of the quick cuts of bold black lines.[7] In his open landscapes these elements of form evoke the simultaneous pleasure and disquiet of the sublime.[8] In his townscapes they offer refuge in mysterious communities where harmonies and rhythms of houses provide comfort for the visual wanderer.[9]

The mountains, paths, towns, vegetation, and the lonely figures in Rimassa’s compositions connect us to the distinctly Bolivian land as well as to a kind of reality and consciousness that reveals Rimassa’s existentialist perspective.[10] In contrast, the Sun and the Moon—and the space in between and beyond—are able to evoke the sight of past or future landscapes in an quasi-religious sense, allowing the viewer to project the mind towards a higher realm in imaginary journeys that leave the body behind for a while, to scope possibilities of other worlds.[11]

One thing is certain when looking at Rimassa’s paintings; the places he invites the viewer to enter are not encroached by urban development; they have not advanced with modern industry or been touched by tourism.[12] Moreover, the spaces, places, and dwellings in Rimassa’s paintings will always remain at the margin of overt political, social commentary, or globalization without succumbing to sentimentalism.[13] [14]