Three years, in the trajectory of the emerging artist, can mean a lot. And enough seems to be meaning in the plastic biography of Silvia Lerín. My first approach to her painting occurred at the end of 1997, when she was still busy with her last course at the Faculty of Fine Arts. From then to here, she herself estimates that many things have happened. She has been followed by prizes, exhibitions and, above all, a blatant plastic evolution.

From that first contact with her work I keep the memory of how much the premature maturity of the painter caught my attention. The observation was not false at all, as evidenced three years later. Because, during this time, far from blindfolding in diverse searches towards his own language, which would not be strange in an incipient artistic biography, he has insisted on the same pictorial universe, which he had already adopted as his own and in which he he continues to feel at ease, as long as he continues to facilitate new possibilities.

“Silvia Lerín walks along coherent plastic paths, open to a future of possibilities”. This is how I concluded my text for January 1998 for her exhibition that year in Alicante. And the truth is that coherence, together with the development of what is feasible, has perhaps been what has presided over her work during this period.

Installed in her non-figurative world, where painting represents itself, she maintains her chromatic intentions and her formal postulates, combining peculiar atmospheres of color with constructions between order and chaos, formulating contradictions between emotion and reason. . In an interview the painter has declared that, in San Carlos, she learned a lot from three of her teachers who, in a way, are present in her work: the expressive vitalism of Pepe Sanleón, the interaction of color on a geometric basis by José María Yturralde and the “pictorial cuisine” of Rafa Calduch.

Pointing out respectable “assumptions”, we should note the presence of the informalism of Antoni Tàpies and the oneirism of Joan Miró, without forgetting other testimonies, ranging from the subtlety of Paul Klee to the roundness of Robert Motherwell.

Without this implying an absence of risk, which will necessarily have been present at all times, his painting has been acquiring greater power and the viewer has the sensation that the painting, this one or that one, could not have been painted in another way, because its colors and its formal composition seem to be what they should be and not others.

Such a situation implies not only the verification of a coherent evolution, but also a deepening in the plastic project itself. In this way, the current stage of Silvia Lerín is presented to us with greater depth, something that invites us to enter an inner cosmos that is beyond the simple surface. That is why, now, the viewer’s gaze cannot be shallow, but a greater detail is required in its contemplative participation.

The interest in color constitutes a fundamental argument in the work of Silvia Lerín. It seems that the painter has frequently written in her notebooks the slogan that Josef Albers gave to her students: “Color is the most relative of the means used by art.” We are not going to explain here, for example, how the word “red”, although it defines a certain chromatic parcel, does not define a specific color, but merely suggests a large family of the chromatic species. The formal relativity alluded to by the German pedagogue and creator is an old acquaintance of our painter who likes to immerse herself in that world to combine with its infinite possibilities, combine a work rich in ambiguities, to the delight of the sensitive viewer.