Being a professor of Silvina Ibanez is a privilege. To know this artists represents an adventure in the world of knowledge. With her, you can infuse with what happened yesterday in the culture, travel through art history and go back to the origins of western civilization: Greece, place where the idea of the Sargas was born and discover how through the Middle Ages widens tha possibility of expression in the blossoming of textile manufacture and the usage of materials and colors which one could think, were works of the pursued witchcraft.
Some of the greatest artist in Renaissance such as Paolo Ucello, Andrea Mantegna and alberto Durero among others, enriched this possibilities and granted them multiple and practical uses of the before mentioned Sargas. Like this, they servedas temporary decorations in the lent services being exposed as penitential curtains with scenes from the Passion of Christ and were kept to be used the following year; also thy were used in the confection of decorative curtains in noble houses or as tapestry. They were flags and banners of the unions and guilds or curtains that worked as scenography for big celebrations such as weddings, king and vice king entries to the city or comedy enactment.
The Sargas then, were transformed into an interdisciplinary art, because they involved textile people, dyers, chemists and painters. Pigments and colorants were interwined like the threads of a marvelous plot with the canvas. However, due to the perishable origin of its materials, this tradition remainded until the XVIII century.
Silvina Ibanez rebirths consciuous and consistently this practice through her sargas intervening the fabric with infinite creativity and through the technical possibilities that modern times bring. Her talent renewed at every moment enriches our senses and presents to us this creations with subjects that interested her: nature, social movements, excessive urban growth and the consequences of our carelessness towards contamination and irreversible damage to the planet. She refers to the eternity of the abstract with images; sometimes classical, some other unknown.
The fabrics are intervened with draperies, artisanal stamps and dyes in order to tranform them into something new, always proactive; at times in a pleasant way for our senses, at other, calling for attention to our consciuousness like an alarm.
The fabrics were the support used by painters in the past; for Silvina Ibanez they are the reason and objetive for her authentic expressiveness . She reminds us that art has an infinite possibility of expression through the talent and disciplined work of whoever creates it and diffuses it with the creative spark of the natural born artist, such as Silvina.
Mayte Sanchez Lozano.
Mexico City. Fall 2013