A year and a half ago, in a prologue to another exhibit by Silvia Rubinson, I highlighted the fact that, as a psychoanalist, she was used to words, and yet she also knew their limits. Since to represent means to name, she avoided any kind of representation. I said back then: “The only image she presents—like someone naming something—is her own work.”
But on this occasion, confronted with the works of this new exhibition, I cannot say the same. There is a context to these works: Silvia, together with her sister, helped their father Hilel Rubinson to create 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. In the process, she came across with papers, photographs, and all kinds of documents from the past. These real objects got mingled, within herself, with abstract feelings: nostalgia, longing, tenderness, and even pain. Her father’s life experiences became hers. In her works, a series of allusions to family writings and images—painted or through the use of collage—started to appear, including also a symbol: her father’s typewriter. These representations coexist, in her last paintings, with a fundamental theme in Silvia’s work: the act of facing life through painting, passionately but lyrically as well. There is no contradiction in that, as visual data allude to family life. We have to bear in mind that, in our everyday parlance, we represent things by naming them, but they are themselves surrounded by abstract terms, such as love, hatred, and adjectives and verbs as well.
In painting, while representation equates substance (noun), color assigns characteristics (adjective), and abstract rhythms indicate action (verb). Silvia Rubinson’s painting, with spots and graphisms, with or without letters, shows us the past in the present. She thus pays homage to the late Wittgenstein, who did not want any more to be silent about what one cannot speak—as he had claimed in his youth—, but rather chose to show, opening himself to artistic languages. That’s why Silvia Rubinson chose painting, the art of image, to give a visible face to two of her fundamental traits: her joie de vivre and her kindness of spirit. Equipped with them, she offers in this exhibit a sensorial visit to the past of her beloved ones. Because this past constitutes present and identity.
Luis Felipe Noé
Buenos Aires, August 2007