Daniel Riera’s photographs are about experience and experiences. Sometimes wonderful, sometimes funny, sometimes dark, sometimes stunning, sometimes nothing, but sometimes even more than that, they are always highly personal and usually very moving experiences, based on the many mixed emotions that the combination of eye, brain, finger and camera can capture when orchestrated by the appropriate virtuoso.

When Daniel asked me to write this text about his work, I had to stop for a while and think about why I love his pictures so much. I didn’t want to take it too seriously, because the bravest part of me felt his work has an immediate eye-catching quality that requires a not-too-intellectual approach. Now I’m convinced that all I like about his work is based on its mixed capricious contradictions.

There is definitely an eye-catching quality and something highly ‘affordable’ for many different viewers in Daniel’s work. They seem - and often are - so unpretentious, so simple, so natural, so attractive. Attractive and dangerous. Dangerous as Mediterranean sirens’ singing, because once you have your mind, your heart and your soul aligned with the stars to start the trip to fall in love with them, this is for ever. That closer approach of a lover reveals a highly refined mind, an exceedingly educated eye, precise as plastic surgery requires and a passionate heart behind them. I like to think that Daniel’s work achieves the perfect harmony between poetics and reflection.

Luis Venegas

www.danielriera.com