La nube quisiera ser un pájaro
Solo show by Silvia Olabarría
La nube quisiera ser un pájaro
Solo show by Silvia Olabarría
21 October - 4 December 2026
In "La nube quisiera ser un pájaro (The cloud would like to be a bird)", Silvia Olabarría continues to work with the elements that have shaped her practice over the past few years: forms, symbols, patterns, repetitions and rhythms. And yet something has changed. Whereas in "The Night" the artist confronted the emptiness of the canvas, searching for the essential conditions that would allow painting to arise, in these new works she seems to inhabit freely the space that emerged from that previous process of exploration.
Perhaps the most profound change lies in the background. In her earlier works, forms danced across a deliberately flat surface, a stage that allowed them to unfold; now that stage is also in motion. Sweeps, transparencies, and small concentrations of colour all contribute to the overall rhythm of the painting, destabilising the relationship between background and figure. There is no longer something in front and something behind: the two elements exchange positions, bleed into one another and ultimately become part of the same event.
Painting thus emerges as the record of an experience of perception. The aim is not to depict a landscape, a bird, a leaf or a particular fragment of nature, but to find a visual structure capable of holding something of the experience of encountering them: the song of a bird, light filtering through trees, a falling leaf, the bodily sensation of moving through a landscape. The forms do not illustrate these experiences; they act as their traces.
In this process, stencils, cut-outs and repetitions function both as tools and as integral elements of the ouvre language. The laser cutting that once introduced mechanical precision now coexists with painterly gesture, generating a tension between control and freedom, repetition and variation, the manual and the mediated. The process is no longer invisible but becomes part of the image itself, as though we could still glimpse the successive steps that made the painting possible.
The body remains part of this system. Breathing, rhythm, observation and movement all inform the artist’s decisions. Painting becomes a way of traversing a surface, measuring it and responding to whatever unfolds upon it. Perhaps this is why these works evoke the stage floor of a postmodern dance performance turned upright: a space in which movement is not represented but inscribed.
The irregular forms that appear in the paintings may suggest leaves, animals, eyes or fragments of bodies, yet none of these associations ever fully takes hold. The viewer’s gaze completes what the painting leaves open. A form may resemble a leaf one moment, only to become something else the next. Perception participates in the construction of the image and, in doing so, keeps the painting in motion.
For this reason, these works do not feel like finished choreographies. Silvia has transformed the elements she has been working with into a kind of choreographic system: every form, every see-through layer, every drag and every interruption occupies a position that could just as easily be another. It is as though each painting allows us to witness a moment in a dance that continues long after we stop looking.
If "The Night" was, in a sense, the rehearsal, "La nube quisiera ser un pájaro" is the premiere. Yet it is a premiere without a definitive choreography. For one of the questions these paintings continue to pose is precisely how painting itself comes into being. The answer seems to lie in that unstable space where background and form, precision and gesture, body and surface, perception and experience cease to be separate things. It is there that painting happens.
Perhaps the most profound change lies in the background. In her earlier works, forms danced across a deliberately flat surface, a stage that allowed them to unfold; now that stage is also in motion. Sweeps, transparencies, and small concentrations of colour all contribute to the overall rhythm of the painting, destabilising the relationship between background and figure. There is no longer something in front and something behind: the two elements exchange positions, bleed into one another and ultimately become part of the same event.
Painting thus emerges as the record of an experience of perception. The aim is not to depict a landscape, a bird, a leaf or a particular fragment of nature, but to find a visual structure capable of holding something of the experience of encountering them: the song of a bird, light filtering through trees, a falling leaf, the bodily sensation of moving through a landscape. The forms do not illustrate these experiences; they act as their traces.
In this process, stencils, cut-outs and repetitions function both as tools and as integral elements of the ouvre language. The laser cutting that once introduced mechanical precision now coexists with painterly gesture, generating a tension between control and freedom, repetition and variation, the manual and the mediated. The process is no longer invisible but becomes part of the image itself, as though we could still glimpse the successive steps that made the painting possible.
The body remains part of this system. Breathing, rhythm, observation and movement all inform the artist’s decisions. Painting becomes a way of traversing a surface, measuring it and responding to whatever unfolds upon it. Perhaps this is why these works evoke the stage floor of a postmodern dance performance turned upright: a space in which movement is not represented but inscribed.
The irregular forms that appear in the paintings may suggest leaves, animals, eyes or fragments of bodies, yet none of these associations ever fully takes hold. The viewer’s gaze completes what the painting leaves open. A form may resemble a leaf one moment, only to become something else the next. Perception participates in the construction of the image and, in doing so, keeps the painting in motion.
For this reason, these works do not feel like finished choreographies. Silvia has transformed the elements she has been working with into a kind of choreographic system: every form, every see-through layer, every drag and every interruption occupies a position that could just as easily be another. It is as though each painting allows us to witness a moment in a dance that continues long after we stop looking.
If "The Night" was, in a sense, the rehearsal, "La nube quisiera ser un pájaro" is the premiere. Yet it is a premiere without a definitive choreography. For one of the questions these paintings continue to pose is precisely how painting itself comes into being. The answer seems to lie in that unstable space where background and form, precision and gesture, body and surface, perception and experience cease to be separate things. It is there that painting happens.
