Raquel Rabinovich’s painting It Is So Dark It Is Transparent (1998) seems at first to simply be a thicket of black scrawls; they’re laid atop each other so densely that the painting nearly looks like a monochrome. In fact, the void contains a hidden message: the painting’s title, written in Jasper Johns–like stencils that only emerge from the inky background upon extended viewing. My iPhone camera seemed to have an easier time making out Rabinovich’s mysterious words than I did at first, which makes sense: the painting is about all which the eye cannot see.
Rabinovich, who died at 102 this past January, specialized in somber, minimalist paintings like that one, which contend with the concept of withholding as a kind of protest. “Silence is a continuing refuge for me,” she once said. Born to a family of Jewish Romanians in Argentina, she was briefly imprisoned under the Perón regime for civil disobedience. Amid political upheaval during 1960s, she then left Argentina for good. She studied in France and Scotland, then moved to US in the ’60s and, in the ’90s, moved to Rhinebeck, about 100 miles north of Manhattan.
In that town, Rabinovich continued creating works in her “River Library” series, for which she enlisted collaborators to help harvest mud from faraway rivers. One piece from the series, included in the Hutchinson Modern show, features brown matter drawn from Peru’s Urubamba River, which Rabinovich affixed with glue onto paper so it looks like an open book. Much like Rabinovich, that mud is a transplant to the US from Latin America, though you’d only know it from reading the checklist. It’s a work that speaks quietly, in a language that’s understandable only to those already familiar with it.
