SILVIO FISCHBEIN
Silvio Fischbein is an architect, a film director, a university professor and a plastic artist. The multiplicity of disciplines practiced sometimes, as it often happens, makes special recognition of some of them difficult. However, maybe that capability to generate perceptions in the observer of his works derives from the particular framework every disciplinary practice has provided him with. His education as an architect has possibly given him a compositional training that can be recognised in his earliest plastic works. Likewise, his latest proposals with the use of light may have something to do with the handling of lighting in the cinematographic practice. Nevertheless, those disciplinary influences in his latest works blend into a language, and it is perceived an evolution that sets his works in the “work in progress” concept, as a permanent question that has several answers. At the times of current art, in which artists put an end to their “questions” very quickly, it is very enriching for the observer to perceive a work of art with positive expectation.
Silvio Fischbein’s work brings us closer to the consideration of one of the procedures contemporary art has used as both compositional and semantic argument: accumulation. This procedure can be found in several contemporary authors, and puts us in a place where we must consider it.
It is said that in a conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, the latter told the Venecian “the story is not in the word, but in the ear”, and we can say that in Silvio Fischbein’s work the story is not in the work of art, but in the spectator.
This would seem to consider the retinal level of the work as the only important one, but I believe it is a particular value knowing Fischbein’s interest in the observer, be this one or several.
Further to the intent to express himself in a visual language that many can appreciate, in his work, his language must be valued as the writing of an event.
As Silvio Fischbein leaves aside the orthogonal support for a freer conception invading space, he gives the work the possibility to settle in an area of open significance that enriches the spectator.
In the works where he incorporates furniture as elements used in other dimensions, like brooms, he heads to the installation concept, moving away from the initial plan that loaded with little men as if the frame was a territory which had to be inhabited.
The 2006 works are presented as a network that traps beings. Then, in the Urban Fragments series they were transformed into frames that became territories occupied by colourful communities with their gadgets and equipment. In the 2009 work, spatial organisations already begin to be perceived. Colour and texture advance in a given space defining maps with vegetation and plots of occupied territories.
In The Celebration works, expressive freedom is perceived the moment he breaks with the frame, incorporating the stain concept, and in the …”from everyday life”… series, he is already entering the universe of installations, in which frames change scales to become windows where matter becomes important and the tiny men take another dimension until they almost disappear in clouds or in larger organisms such as furniture, and the names “reredos”, “brooms” begin to be participants in the sense given by the observer. Now, the little men have defined actions that can be read in the interaction.
In summary, in the work shown by Silvio Fischbein, beyond a heavy and arduous journey, we perceive a work that looks like a work in progress, which could be seen as breaking free from formal ties, resorting to expressive freedom, and which augurs and proposes an open and novel future.
Ricardo Blanco / May 2012