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Silvia Gubern

05/10/73. (Sala 011)

“Vous qui ne voyez pas, pensez à ceux qui voient”.

Bows, ribbons, tablecloths, stars, lamps, animals and plants, the desert, stones, bones, light that illuminates objects and objects that radiate light, fish, columns, curtains behind which there is “something”, things hung with little chains, things supported, things that float and things that support other things, paintings that represent paintings. Examples of elements that make up Silvia Gubern’s painting.

With them she creates anagrams whose solution always reveals important things to which we did not give importance or makes us forget ridiculous things that we considered “essential”.

Her figurative medium has some reading components that we can summarize in four groups:

1st- Use of a fixed medium. This consists of painting the images inverted on a glass, so that what the spectator sees is “behind” the support, which suggests that what is represented does not belong to the world of tangible things. The wooden frames separate us even more from the work and help us to be aware of this “transit”.

2nd- The “reading signs” are formulated at the sentence level: words, letters, invented writings, phrases, etc. All of them mean exactly themselves, as it happens in the Kabbalah, the Gospel and the moralistic calendars.

3rd- The colors correspond to the forms and not to the contents of the forms. They can be applied in the form of flat and trimmed paintings of soft blurring or of precipitates filled with disordered brushstrokes, but they are always at the service of what is represented. The colors are “forms”, they are the “background”, they are the “print” and above all “the colors of the painting”, the attributes of the identification of the object.

4th- The figurative elements are the inhabitants of the personal mythological world of the artist, who adopt different forms to assume the theatrical role that corresponds to them in each painting, as in the representations of puppets or in those of “La Comedia dell’Arte”.

We must see the solution of continuity that this last series of works on glass represents with respect to the evolution of the artist.

Contrary to what usually happens, Silvia Gubern is not at all interested in the continuity and homogeneity of his work. She spends long periods practically inactive and only works when there is an immediate creative stimulus.

These “creative islands” -which respond to the same “weltanschaung” but each time attend to different and atomized experiences- are the lost paradise of artists committed to a constant and often tedious production.

We think that Silvia Gubern is the reincarnation of Germaine Berton, the most luminous surrealist divinity.

Santiago Roqueta

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