Silvia Gurfein

Things begin with a word. Or with a prayer. Temporary. Dawdle. Less things longer. Words that produce a rapid oscillation between the two cerebral hemispheres. Words like arrows at the intersection. Polysemia. Words like mental sculptures. In a state of confidence and without any need to remember, I paint. In the morning I play music. Obsessively for a while, I hear the same disk or the same track, on and on. Sufjan Stevens season, a season of Hot Chip, or Kings of Convenience, Badly Drawn Boy, Rufus Wainwright, Plastikman and so on. In the afternoon I listen to the radio. Spend the evening listening to the tinkling of bells on the horses, cluck cluck, mateos returning home. I put the paintings on the walls / panel in my shop. My studio is beautiful and very small, so I have no perspective when I do larger paintings so I look at them from the out door, foreshortened. I'm surrounded by my stuff and I have plenty of natural light. I work on several canvases simultaneously. I usually draw a grid - skeleton in pencil on the canvas following a personal math. I define a quality: acid, grating, kind, arbitrary or unknown. I do then a first palette that takes a sector of the fabric, I forget about all the starting points and begin to paint. In most cases, I cannot remember how I did what I did and cannot repeat it. I am a machine. Convinced that the body of the oil contains all the summary information of the history of painting, sometimes acting as a spectrograph that let us know the composition of a star by drawing light intervals. Sometimes I take a small piece of work, my own or others’, identify each color of this piece as a unit of meaning and the development of those colors, I extrapolate then as a deed of color bands on the fabric. I work layer upon layer and then scrape the layers through incisions that are like threads of light. Sometimes extreme the idea of overlapping images and the difficulty of capturing them by overlapped information. I wonder about the way that electronic media change the way we see and do painting. I explore the failures of the machine. My computer often hangs, I photograph the monitor when this happens. I like new technology and I really like its failures. I behave like a computer which pixels, displaces, fragments and blurs the image reflected in the picture. I do not sketch on the computer, what you see, is in my head. I recombine the atoms of my work in temporary, provisional crossings and encounters, , therefore emerging forms and structures that remained hidden, noting many ways, just as does the word Temporary. I have always constructed orthogonal images: the same pattern (01010) of which digital images are made of -the sum of angles and not by the sum of points, as the old photograph-. This quality creates an effect that is substantially different: between points there is necessarily empty spaces while not in-between the squares. However, this year without wanting it and without being able to recall the origin of the drive (I guess that it was the mother of all things: need) I found myself doing curves in my work. Far from becoming a sensual aspect of the work, these small paintings, fit a mathematical rigor and leave me little choice. They are like mathematical or magic formulas to think time, once again I built laws which allow me to work while I get locked up again, until the next law is defined. I often think of the friction between the acceleration of the world and the sluggishness of pictorial production, the flattening of the history and its own availability, the changing of the narrative discourse towards a horizontal perception of temporality. The crazy acceleration that our visual perception has been exposed to. I think how the painting, its production, its perception and observation, may produce a temporary wedge, an extension of time perception and hence its increasing availability. "Time is watching us. Time is horizontal, like a cloth that folds and unfolds, and it is like water that runs off faster near emptiness. Time in painting contemplates us, and to paint is to make all the presents visible. And painting is a snail. I waste my time ...”

Sometimes I see my paintings as a song of My Bloody Valentine or Mike Ink. A familiar song that is heard in the distance, obscured by noise textures. Like satellite images jammed by spatial junk. Computer monitors failing, interfered flattened space, visual noise in conventional format of an oil painting. The nonlinear story, concentrated, all presents simultaneously. A visual koan. And of all forms.

My interests are crossed and none programmed, ranging from Bruegel to Deshimaru Taisen Debussy, Neo Rauch at krautrock, from Roberto Aizenberg to David Bohm and Arturo Herrera. From Stanley Kubrick to Virginia Woolf or Sufjan Stevens, from Alexander McQueen to John Berger; from Bauhaus architecture to Leonardo Da Vinci and My Bloody Valentine, from Rupert Sheldrake to Simone Weil, a long list ...I Overlap all traditions, and practices without tradition. I do not see a linear fashion. I see things like a hologram. The history of art as flat land on which to take a nice walk. A fabric of music, painting, words ...

There have been many, they have in common that they made me think that it's possible. And I wanted to go running to work.