Interested in revealing the metaphorical power of different materialities, she uses the electronic medium and the moving image to record stillness, the imminent and the subjective perception of time.
At the same time, she trained with Kenneth Kemble, in whose workshop she worked as a drawing teacher, and with Víctor Grippo, whom she considers her main reference and with whom she reflects on materials[11] and the power contained in them.
In these works, Rivas incorporates diverse techniques and materials, such as photographic emulsion on stainless steel plates, interventions with resin, natural elements, glass and graphite.
During this period, the circulation circuit of contemporary art in Buenos Aires was still dominated by the division into traditional disciplines, making his objects difficult to classify.
In 2000, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship[4] with the project Notas sobre el tiempo (Notes on Time), which allowed him to mount a twelve-channel video installation at the Cronopios[12] hall of the Centro Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires in 2001, in the midst of the institutional explosion in Argentina.
Looking at Rivas's work with hindsight, there is no doubt that she is a pioneer of experimentation with the "expanded" possibilities of video, in its qualities for both installation and ambience, and not only in Argentina, but also within the broader context of Latin America."
At the same time, Rivas makes a series of portraits of young people taken as archetypes and returns to the theme of landscape in Pequeño acontecimiento-Paisaje a definir.
In 2014 he manages to exhibit the complete series at the Museo Municipal de Bellas Artes Juan B. Castagnino[15] in the city of Rosario, Argentina, generating a journey through several rooms, in which obsessive actions and rhythms follow one another.
[16] In the following period, simultaneously with the filming of Momentum,[17] she made small installations or assemblages with video, treating the landscape as an imaginary and artifice of Paradise.
Pieces from this series that include materials such as Carrara marble or porcelain, were shown in the exhibition Migraciones en el Arte contemporáneo[18][19] at MUNTREF[20] in the 2019 edition of Bienalsur and at RolfArt.
Materials and their physical particularities occupy a prominent place in the work of Silvia Rivas traveling through different supports according to their metaphorical potential.
In the artist's vision, internally the subject only finds his power in an attitude of tenacious and constant resistance, firmly taken to his present.
Her aesthetic questions the viewer, invites him to immerse himself in a universe of more or less constant realities, confronting him through her video installations with unfathomable dimensions of spatiality and temporality.
The protagonism that the body is acquiring as the axis of some existential conflicts are becoming flesh when Rivas begins to work with performers, who, being taken as archetypes, provide a concrete and situated corporeality, as seen in Todo lo de Afuera (2004) or Fuerza diagonal (2018).
The existential – and even metaphysical – concern deepens in the immediately subsequent works, when the human figure reappears as the guiding thread of poetic reflection: Momentum (2017), Fuerza diagonal (2018).