Nina Silverberg: In Proximity, At a Distance

Insight, Discovery, and Find are titles which suppose an intrepidity, an odyssey. No stasis is inferred by those words, nor isolation or limitation. Rather, they suggest constant movement, purpose, curiosity, a drive for novelty. Little, then, that can be achieved within the confines of a bedroom, one would imagine. 

At first glance, the visual qualities of Nina Silverberg’s paintings contradict this sense of adventure. They are muted and solemn, characterised by isolation and poetic tedium, contained within the abstracted space of a chamber. The title Corners immediately conjures a sense constraint, and Sleeping In stagnation. Her paintings figure, with the tenor and pitch of an elegy, a world seen from afar, imagined, or reproduced. A city seen from a window, or within a book, patterned with rain drops; gloves suggest a deprivation of physical contact; a bed suspended in space evokes the solitude of a bedroom. 

The works which comprise Fittings are semi-biographical. Silverberg spent long periods of her early adulthood isolated due to sickness. Yet, to judge from these paintings, it appears not to have been a time of stasis, but one fecund with potentiality. Silverberg is fascinated with all that can be found in isolation and repetition, the creative possibilities wrought within hermeticism, the systems by which limitation breeds novelty. She finds civilisations in books, polyphonic harmonies in the patterns of rain drops, beauty in distance and denial, calm in solitude.

Silverberg’s formal compositions hark back to the early Renaissance. Buildings are rendered on a single plane, without perspective, resembling the trecento works of Duccio or Giotto. In effect, cities seem near, yet simultaneously far. Likewise, books lay open immediately before us, but figure worlds detached from our own. Despite the pictorial distance Silverberg is able to generate, there exists a paradoxical proximity and intimacy to the objects she depicts, accentuated by the diminutive scale of the works, which invites close inspection.

Yet the works remain plaintive, and wistful. Compositions of repeated motifs are expressively bare, and the omission of any perspective, any pictorial depth, can inspire a stifling claustrophobia. The world beyond the walls of her bedroom is, still, the object of her desire. Books, gloves, and beds remain the agents and signals of her solitude. Waiting, meditating, imagining, she invents by necessity, by impulsion, to fill the absence, transforming this abstract space into a world of its own, and the sombre artifacts that deny her that human intimacy for which she longs take on their own depth and universality. One work repeats an open book, upon pages of which are roofs, gently repeated through geometric forms, seen from a window. It bears the title The Beginning and the End, indicative of the totality that Silverberg searches for, and finds, within limitation