In 1959 Raquel found herself in Edinburgh, Scotland. She had moved there from Argentina in the mid-1950s to be with José Luis Reissig, a molecular biologist whom she married in 1956. While José conducted research at the University of Edinburgh, Raquel made great strides in her artistic practice. Despite describing herself as “quiet and alone” during the years that she lived in Scotland, she appreciated the introspective nature of her time there. It was in Edinburgh that Raquel transitioned from figurative work to resolute abstraction. Bestechetwinde, a series of paintings from her Edinburgh years, evidences not only this transition but her burgeoning interest in themes that would sustain her for a lifetime: the relationship between darkness and light, dreams, and language. Bestechetwinde 7 brings Raquel’s series When Silence Becomes Poetry, created more than fifty years later, to the forefront of my mind: the horizontal lines, blocky emergences, the shape of a feeling, an idea, before it attaches itself to a word or a sentence. Here, on a cooling plane of steel blue, teal, black, and gray, Raquel’s artistic vocabulary is already beginning to consolidate, foretelling the culminating works of her brilliant career.
—Susan Breyer
