Silvia Gurfein
Zavaleta Lab. Buenos Aires
The strength of the work drawing and installed painting in Silvia Gurfein’s (Buenos Aires, 1959) exhibition El libro de las excepciones (The Book of Exceptions) imposes itself in the exhibition space with double-height ceilings of Zabaleta Lab gallery. The artist’s previous works for the theater, as well as those in video and music have left their traces on her production in the field of the visual arts. It is possible to perceive an original openness in the cadence of the colors and the movement of the forms, and a potentiated sensibility in the repetition of the lines and in the use of light in the works of this multidisciplinary artist who also studied philosophy and drama. “The crossing between the contemporary gaze and the historical practice of painting is a recognizable axis in my work.When I paint I situate myself at the intersection of two different time dimensions, that of my digital mind and the ancestral time of oil. It is there that my work is produced,” says Gurfein, who began to show her work in 2001.
El libro de las excepciones unfolds in the exhibition space like a volume with many open and scattered pages, but also like a bookcase with an excess of material scattered on the floor, in irregular piles, or resting against the walls in an unorthodox manner. The artist is the fictional heroine of these series of paintings, which refer the viewer intensely to a literature written with images, in a combination of abstract and figurative, and with the colors of the rainbow. The titles of the “chapters” offer clues, illustrate the quotations found in the folds of the work. The reiteration of lines, forms, and rhythms creates harmonious variations with different tempos and resources of one same pattern in whose center painting is dazzling.
