La Noche

We present "La Noche", the third solo exhibition by Silvia Olabarría (Bilbao, 1974) at El Chico. This body of work continues her investigation into the internal mechanisms of pictorial creation. In "No Parpadee" (2023), Olabarría revealed the process itself as the main protagonist, highlighting accidental overlaps, mistakes, and cuts as essential parts of her language. Here, that exploration expands into a broader and more meditative dimension: the experience of time, of the body, and of night as metaphor.

Since the beginning of her career, Silvia Olabarría has worked between figuration and abstraction, understanding both languages not as opposites but as complementary elements that allow for different degrees of ambiguity, synthesis, and resonance. In recent years, her practice has shifted towards an abstraction built from essential signs — stains, marks, cut-out shapes — which, in their arrangement, reveal the way the artist approaches the act of painting.

"La Noche" is constructed around fundamental questions: how does form emerge from emptiness? What part of the process is guided, and what part is left open to spontaneity? Can an abstract composition sustain an internal structure, a rhythm, a narrative? These concerns run throughout the exhibition and organically dialogue with the questions already present in her previous work, where the artist experimented with the materiality of hand-cut and later laser-cut stencils, letting herself be guided both by controlled arbitrariness and by the accidents of the process.

In this new series, Olabarría begins with elemental, recognizable, and shared images — circles, stars — unfolding variations that, when seen together, create a network of rhythms and pauses. Each painting functions as a moment suspended in time, but also as part of a larger sequence. Time here becomes a pictorial material: subtle shifts from one piece to the next, minimal alterations in form or color, create an almost musical cadence.

The choice of titles — drawn from poems by Elizabeth Bishop and from "Agua Viva" by Clarice Lispector — reinforces this temporal and bodily dimension. "The instant-now", "Now is an instant", "It is already a different now", "¿What color is infinite space?", and "It is the color of air" are fragments that mark moments of awareness, of full attention to the present, resonating with the artist’s parallel practice of yoga, meditation, and pranayama. It is also from here that some paintings bear titles such as "Susumna", "Pingalá", and "Atha", terms from yogic tradition that refer to the body's energetic channels and the present moment.

If in her previous exhibition the artist sought not to miss the infinite possibilities offered by the process, in "La Noche" this state of attention deepens. The night, understood not only as a time of day but as a space of interiority, latent rhythms, and expanded perception, becomes a metaphor for the artistic process itself: a territory where intuition, breath, and heartbeat guide the construction of forms.

At a time when final results tend to eclipse the value of the process, Silvia Olabarría insists on reminding us that painting is about building from nothing, about inhabiting the void with extreme attention, about surrendering to continuous transformation. "La Noche" does not offer definitive answers; rather, it proposes a sensitive experience where each painting is an interval, a threshold inviting us to look more slowly, to breathe alongside the painting, and to recognize in each form the silent vibration of the body and of time.