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◉ ‘Geometry as the basic form of nature’. Text from the solo exhibition catalog ‘SILVIA LERÍN’ edited by ‘Obra social de la CAM’ in 2007. Legal deposit: A-1104-2007

There are things that can only be said with geometric shapes because they lack a “form” with which we can represent them. Because one is not always talking about “things” that have physical substance. And so geometry, aided by color, becomes a symbolic language of states of mind, emotions, feelings, internal movements of the artist that has to manage to inform –in both senses of the word, form and form, – building complex perceptual objects. To these formal characteristics of shape and color is added the texture that appears from the beginning and gradually fades away, but it is pure rhetoric, which is why maturity dilutes it. The texts that appear in some early pieces and soon disappear are also rhetorical. Almost automatic writing texts, which ultimately did not seem to add anything to the work. Thus, the author really plays with the most basic data of nature, shape and color. Two elements that, however simple they may seem, are really enough for a long artistic career. With these two elements she builds Nature in all its diversity. And so the artist has recognized.

For the observer, Silvia’s paintings, taken individually, are sensations that, without a doubt, will produce in his mind certain sensations and ideas that have to do with his own history, since geometry and color, worked to be perceived, are interpreted from the self. They are an excuse for introspection since their meaning lies in the abstraction of the experience itself. For this reason, the joint vision of Silvia’s career tells us about the artist and her internal movements, about her emotional fluctuations, because everything passes through the years, and the years are experience and knowledge. .

Throughout her career, blue and red colours dominate, with a certain appreciation for yellow, basic colours such as the geometric shapes she uses. They are not flat colours but nuances that are well worked with large tonal masses. Colours that are perceived at a distance or colours that are perceived up close, cold or warm, always intense and saturated. She is constant in the work of a mixed technique composed of an acrylic mixture that she herself builds based on pigments and latex and to which she adds marble dust to achieve textures.

The paintings are always built on superimposed planes, achieving the perspective and volume of their large patches of color. A perspective that he also sometimes achieves by breaking the planes and leaving small breaks that, moreover, have the virtue of producing a dynamic image, in movement, that sometimes seems more frenetic but that in its beginnings and during the last years, are of serene stability. The balance of forms is more typical of Silvia than the unstable movement of the elements. That is why most of her paintings have a vertical reading based on horizontal pavements.

The perceptual tension is generated in the treatment of color and, sometimes, in elements that struggle to penetrate the great masses, pressing them and establishing the communicative dialectic of forms.

From the year 2000 she softens the colours, even with great texture, and expands the color range towards green, white… coinciding with a break in formats, although the square continues to predominate. Her compositions are already more complex, the planes are multiplied and there is some research towards the curved that she finally does not come to fruition, she does not feel comfortable with those forms that are more unstable than the orthogonal ones with which she always works. The lines become firmer, but also, when the diagonal enters as a formal element, the work appears more unstable, more dynamic, sometimes giving the sensation that the painting falls perceptually to one side, as if the forms were captured at that precise moment prior to their collapse. It is at this moment when the work of the texture begins to be diluted, when the washes become more frequent and intense, disappearing in the backgrounds that, in turn, sometimes disappear in a background white that is almost the disappearance of it. Floating geometric shapes like planets in constant motion pushed by dark sources of energy. This increase in movement becomes a game with the imbalance in her pieces from 2002, the flat images are barely sustained. What produces the perceptual sensation of movement and instability.

But diagonals and imbalance are not his way. From the first moment his language is that of the inclined masses and the cracks through which the bottom or other planes appear. And from the first moment to start his work, he establishes an orthogonal shape of paper on the plane so that it serves as a starting point, sometimes inadequate, others, defining everything that will come later. Since she Silvia does not work from the sketch and the intellectual composition of the plane, but she looks directly for the forms in the creation process itself. She is, in this sense, an expressionist creator in the sense that this term has in B. Croce’s texts. The repetitive washings that she applies to her force her to let the paintings dry well before putting successive layers of pigment on them, so she always has more than one painting and more than two in her hands. Going from one image to another in search of what her forms ask of her, she constructs evidently perceptual objects because she constructs them from her own perception. Which shows a good knowledge of the classics of pictorial geometry.

This mode of creation has, perhaps, something random, chance that is welcome in some cases because, when it happens, it is the painting itself that imposes itself on the artist, in the sense that, committed in one direction, chance twists the forces and it produces unexpected but undoubtedly valid plots that are ultimately decisive to the final forms of the work.

Her forms always seem to grow upwards, perhaps for this reason, at times, the observer notices a certain remote allusion to forms external to the painting itself, perhaps to nature itself, which, in terms of growth, well, always tends towards verticality.

Geometry is something that comes to him, as if J. Addison was right when he says that the human soul has a structure similar to the forms of nature and beauty. Because if so, only with geometry could one speak of the anima. Mondrian already said it, the meanings that he wanted to express in his paintings could only be represented with the basic shapes of nature, the simple geometric shapes.

His works, increasingly mature and daring, more voluminous, are struggling to get out of the plane to become a three-dimensionality that, after a brief experimentation, he has finally rejected, although who knows where it would have led him! Instead, what has happened is that she has expanded to convert her paintings into large murals that she calls “movable” because they are partial paintings built as loose pieces, which once placed on the wall spread out from what was can consider the limits of a work. The expansive energy of her works did not seek to go out towards the viewer but to expand both in the plane and to absorb whoever looks at it. Envelop the viewer in a large patch of color, giving her the feeling that her world has just changed.

M.T. Beguiristain

 2007 – Vicepresidenta AICA

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