Raquel Rabinovich

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

Breezy autumn crisp morning, edging into winter.

I see you there, standing by your dried-out garden. The beautiful flowers, arugula, tomatoes and sunflowers are now no longer there. But I know they will be reborn in 6 months. There is a certain comfort in knowing that grandma's garden was always reborn. Year after year. Decade after decade. 

Thank you for teaching us to embrace the cycles of life, thank you for showing us beauty in the dark.

The darkness is where we find comfort as well. A place where we're left with no choice but to confront our souls.

 — Gabriela Lazzaro

The series The Dark is Light Enough, that my mother worked on during the 1960s, is meaningful to me in various ways. An anecdote she often told was about a conversation she held with Jorge Luis Borges, one of many on a park bench across from the National Library which he headed, in which she invites him to her upcoming exhibition, a moment in which he tells her that he is blind, recognizing that she had never realized it… a credible story knowing how naive my mother could be, in the best sense of the word. In their rapport, he proposed the non-literal translation into Spanish (la oscuridad tiene su luz) of the title of a book she was fond of, called The Dark is Light Enough. So she actually began the series with the Spanish name, which has a subtle but different meaning (darkness has its light). This gesture he offered her came with a sense of belonging and recognition at a transcendental level, as she often floated in an ephemeral, almost an oneiric state of mind—it was her way of being in the world. She was good at integrating the emotional with the intellectual, as I believe comes through in much of her work. This is reflected in this series, which she worked on during what was probably the most significant decade throughout her life; she returned from Europe to Argentina, and then emigrated again, this time to New York. A decade in which she brought her 3 children into this world, so on a personal note, I feel very much a part of this series, literally and emotionally... Q.E.P.D.

 — Pedro Reissig

The idea for making glass sculptures came to Raquel in a dream. She envisioned her paintings moving from the walls and materializing in spatial form. Using commercially produced grey and bronze sheets of glass, she created this series in the 1970s and 1980s. These works are poetic, elusive architectures. They hold light as well as lightness. They propose illusions and are capable of shifting perceptions and assumptions. They have a slippery relationship to time and site and range from large-scale installations to tabletop arrangements. These works are physical but they contain Raquel’s vast imaginary worlds and underworlds within. They are concrete visualizations of a dream; they exist in the space between everything and nothing and back again.

- Heather Rowe

The wondrous improbabilities of the invisible cities that Marco Polo conjured from his imagination not only beguiled the Mongol Emperor, Kublai Khan; they inspired one of Italo Calvino's most celebrated books, entitled Invisible Cities. His poetic retelling of Polo's narratives captivated Raquel Rabinovich who inscribed excerpts of Calvino's texts with rubber-stamped ink upon paintings that share this name. These visionary transmissions involved oral, literary, and painterly forms of expression. They are separated by gaping distances of space and time. Yet they flowed gracefully from one to the other by sharing the art of evoking (not explaining), suggesting (not describing), implying (not asserting).  Rabinovich's paintings epitomize such elusive qualities by rendering the city's topographic hardscape as a mirage formed of refracted light. Physicality and its mundane associations evaporate into mist. These artworks untether human consciousness and beckon viewers to undergo a journey that is as grand and inspiring as Polo's, and as poetically relayed as Calvino's. They transcend season and era and place and self and memory and location and gravity. A Calvino quote chosen by Rabinovich relays these virtues: "From one part to the other, the city seems to continue, in perspective, multiplying its repertory of images: but instead it has no thickness, it consists only of a face and an obverse, like a sheet of paper, with a figure on either side, which can neither be separated nor look at each other."

 — Linda Weintraub

This work by Raquel evokes an intriguing feeling in me, one that is simultaneously imbued with serenity and beauty. Its symmetry creates a spiritual balance that subtly transports us to an immaterial world. This piece, created between 1989 and 1990, reminds me of the influence of her travels to different continents in search of new experiences, which, combined with her capacity for contemplation, is reflected in the transformation of her art compared to her prior works in glass. Raquel, a friend of many years, expressed in her art the calm she radiated. We miss her dearly, and she leaves us with a precious memory through her friendship and her art. 

— Fanny Sanín

Everything in this small—black?—palimpsest of 30 × 40 inches: the ego, the tiny and the immense, the happiness of being present, all the doubts and the sadnesses, the handbook of strengths and weaknesses, reasons and wanderings. All the dreams and the nightmares too, the sleepless nights, the eternal nights. The point, the infinite, the wise and relaxed hand, the fine wrinkles and the great furrows, the iris lightened by the years, the mist spread out like a tablecloth. Also the violet cold and the warm spring afternoons, all the seasons, the slow and certain repetition, brushstroke upon brushstroke, the stars. All the darkness and chaos of life has its light. If one can see in the dark, one can see everything.

— Mariana Eliano

Looking at Raquel’s painting reminds me of a book she gave me in 2018 by David Hinton, which is focused on an ancient Chinese painting by Shih-T’ao. David Hinton wrote “there is no distinction between empty awareness and the expansive presence of existence.” Perhaps this Zen waxy rectangle captures something out of that book—"morning sunlight through windows lighting the floor.” 

 — Steven Holl

The River Library collection was an inspiration of Raquel’s born from her travels through India and her passion for making the invisible visible. Her “papel de barro” as she would call it seemed more like love letters to the innermost recesses of her heart. Raquel (my mom), would send all of us on mud missions whenever we travelled. I remember on one trip to Puerto Rico she sent me on a mud mission which took me to this river in Utuado where it had recently rained and we went sliding down the mud all the way into the river—it was as if mom knew that half the adventure was getting the mud not just bringing it back for its intended purpose. This piece from the Urubamba River held special significance for Raquel as did the country of Peru where the river is located.  Raquel lived a life that always paralleled her artwork and mirrored her adventurous spirit. 

— Nora Reissig

dialogues stir emergences

dialogues across space and time

poets whose words stir you

root-like

spreading into dark crevices deep underground

where light seeps amongst shadows

*

he wrote to your stone dances in the folds of woods

women who run with stones

make stones sound

sound stones bend

say your earth for you¹

the shape of things when mist descends

softens edges

jagged spines dissolve

leaving whisperings

echoing in the curves of caves

skies burst in deep ebonies and wild azure blues

stones of earthen hues scatter on river shores

those silent sentinels that mark the passing of lives

here where light gathers at dusk

where silence becomes poetry

you sprout images birthed from shadows that prowl through dawn dreams

shrouded in dew

mists cling on the edges of lives

when silence becomes poetry

we are rebirthed

the earth sings to the rhythm of waves

of mud

of silt

the acrid sweet smells of life amongst knot gardens

tea-like rivers tamin-bled from oak leaves   pine needles   cedar bark

swirl drunk-like caressing stone-strewn muddy bottoms

^{1-lines from George Quasha poem Women Who Run with Stones (For Raquel on number 70—March 28, 1999)}

— Celia Reissig

Revisualizing visual art is one of my concerns. In other words, I’d like for the visual not to depend on verbal explanations. The visual alone impacts the soul and those who look receive in their gaze its intensity by osmosis. 

Raquel Rabinovich’s soil paintings trigger in my eye/mind a sacral intensity. I feel their skin soft and rugged as an ancestral sheet that pulsed on my body while I was born and will cover me when I am dust. 

Her delicate hand attaches the soil to a surface and transforms it into a primal presence outlined by clear yet uneven margins—it becomes a territory of the mind.

After the ritual of looking, I then learn that the soils in so many colors issue from rivers far and near, the rivers that for centuries were gods for the people who dwelled next to them. Their mud was carried from far far away by messenger travelers to be delivered in Raquel’s place of metamorphosis. This knowledge extends my sight like an echo around the Earth. So, the visual is multiplied into an imagination of ancient journey to the endless aimless just being here, a considerate attentive gift to those who may stop for a moment and look. 

— Lucio Pozzi

From the beginning of her career, Raquel expressed a preoccupation with what she called “the dark source,” a realm that is not easily accessed but one rich with knowledge and wisdom. This is what she said about her approach: 

I am drawn to spaces of silence in which my work can transcend its materiality, where I can access a primordial source from which ideas and inspiration come. My practice emerges from that source and attempts to enact that emergence. My fascination with the undefinable nature of existence has spurred my lifelong exploration of what I call the "dark source," which embodies concealed aspects of existence lying behind the appearance of things, thoughts, and language. Through my work, I seek to reveal that which is concealed emerging into view. I try to make the invisible visible. 

I believe that Raquel’s affinity for these dark spheres was in her DNA, in a predilection for rumination, for needing to dig below the surface of things.  But it was also rooted in her Jewish ancestor’s history of persecution; her imprisonment in Argentina; philosophy, like Plato’s allegory of the cave; and places she sought out, like the inner sanctums of temples she visited in India  As she says, “Everything I witnessed left a mark; I was open to everything, I absorbed everything.”  

— Elizabeth Ferrer