“Shadow theater” is the name Silvia Rubinson chose for this exhibit: in it, like in that dramatic genre, shadows are vertical, instead of horizontal or oblique. But, in this case, many of the “shadows” are actually inverted, white over black, like negatives. In the “organisms” she presents, nothing draws more attention than their vitality. Like someone that, studying insects, zooms in and becomes surprised by their inner complexity and detail, Silvia does not get carried away by the convening spot—rather, she populates it with a remarkable graphic richness. That’s why I stress that her spots think: they think about themselves. Looking at these works, the image that came to my mind—I don’t know the reason—was that of a saxophonist speaking the sound of the instrument. And why? Maybe because the works are forceful, and at the same time subtle.
Seven years ago, in another prologue I wrote to an exhibit of hers—in which, through abstract painting, she presented her artistic endeavor to the public for the first time—I alluded to her other profession, psychology. I then stressed that Silvia, used to working with words, also knew their limits. In her artistic work she avoided, and still avoids, any representation other than that of the unconscious in the process of becoming conscious. That’s why now she synthesizes, in the presence of the spot, the analysis of her inner world.
Later on, however, figuration started to appear in her work, as I also mentioned in 2007, in a second prologue to an exhibit of hers. It did so mainly in family figures, sometimes through the method of collage, which emerged as a consequence of she and her sister having helped their father to complete a book on the family history and the memories of his childhood and youth, spent in a Jewish colony in the Argentine province of Entre Ríos. These figurative allusions were accompanied with writings. Beyond their contents, these writings are drawings: letters, presented as what they are, alien to any regulated thought. That exhibit introduced Silvia to an idea then materialized with her sister Rut. Since their father’s book alluded to a specific example of immigration, the sisters planned to pay a general homage to immigration, regardless of origins, on the occasion of our country’s 200th anniversary celebrations. Thus, they both got embarked in the challenge, through the use of big scrolls. Silvia painted on them spots and graphisms that, with or without letters, even alluding to different languages, were like letters addressed to the past, full of sensitive gestures.
The current exhibit, as part of the cycle “La línea piensa” (“The line thinks”), marks yet another station of her artistic journey. Her visual poetics has already been embraced as her own, that is, as a way of being Silvia Rubinson. Starting from the stain as an image—configured through pigments, binders, water, acrylic, charcoal, graphite, and mica—, she shows us a new form of human representation with no allusion to the body whatsoever. Corporeity results, in this case, from the objectivation of her subjectivity, materialized in stains full of subtleties and interior drawings—that means, not as expressionist gesture, but rather as inner thought. It is one of the features of this exhibit the presence of images divided in two parts, each on a different paper: continuity, in spite of interruption, like in an inner dialogue.
The beauty and singularity of this exhibit enunciate an artist at her peak.
Luis Felipe Noé
La Línea Piensa 2013