THE VISUAL POETRY OF SILVIA FLICHMAN

I often say something I deeply believe: painting is essentially abstract because its building elements line, color, space - are connotative before denotative. Figurative is the world around us as well as ourselves. In this sense painting has the possibility, if the artist want, of being hyper-realistic, or based on these elements\\\' coordination, a mixture of abstract and figurative elements, or even remaining in the abstraction ’ s domain. However, in the XX century with the affirmation of abstract painting, a fourth element, the collage, was added allowing the achievement of a new image based on previous ones.

I recall all this to mention Silvia Flichman ’ s work in which the stage space -the white surface of canvas- is privileged with the purpose of making the line dance among colors which (musically, I would say) dance with it. The strange thing is that as a methodology the collage prevails in her work, but Silvia breaks into pieces the referential image (if this is the case) given that she is interested in the sensoriality of the materials she applies to build the work.

The paintings of Silvia achieve in this way a very peculiar charm: the images she offers are witnesses, very well refined by sensibility, if not always enjoyed, of lived life. But her paintings, even through a certain melancholy, smile with irony. And her painting is very much an example of visual poetry because she uses all the mentioned elements in an essential way to refer abstractly to life, as one who says it is “ love ” .

Luis Felipe Noe / 2008

THE ROLE OF THE ARTIST

Flichman goes from the technical exploration to the echoes of history through the gluing of paper pieces.

Silvia Flichman ’ s works don\\\'t have titles. Probably her intention is to focus the viewer, without guides, without suggestions, into the silent contemplation of the work.

A first approach to her work shows the exploration of gluing on different supports. Rice paper, silk or craft paper, which generally have a particular lightness, are impregnated with a preparation of water and glued and fixed to the support. The softness acquired allows the wrinkle, the crowding, the pile up of transparencies. Later, the varnish or the very diluted paint, cover the support and produce new emergencies. In other work, the procedure consists in covering with paint and wiping afterwords: the color is retained in the material\\\'s wrinkles as a trace produced solely by time. This first gluing moment, almost expressionist, gives place later to the emergence of more controlled shapes: sometimes a complex work with transparencies covers the support as a whole, other times the shape the gluing generated falls from the top as a cascade, or grows from below.

Her recent work, more refined, is structured from a central core, some black graphism, which embrace the support format and settle in an empty field, Sometimes a work reveals the gluing of a family letter. Chosen by the quality of the paper it adds, despite the artist, the calligraphy trace of the loved ones and the work charges itself with new meaning. That way, between the automatism of gesture that relates to the surrealist tradition and the technical possibility of exploration, Flichman searches in the subtle terrain of sensitivity.

Maria Teresa Constantin /2004