We're always going on about the word "freedom", but few people know what it really means. You can live in a supposedly free country and be the most submissive person going, follow whatever the crowd dictates so as to blend into it, and still believe, after all that, that you're free.
Blocking off the conventional, putting up a wall against the politically correct and breathing air that's clean of consumerist pollution, that's how you weave a slightly freer life, that's how you can make art that's fresh and imaginative. Like the art of Silvia Raquel Bregar, a (free) artist who has been living her dream of devoting herself entirely to creating since she arrived in Mallorca almost 10 years ago.
Compulsive shoppers
That's the title the Argentine artist gives to one of her collections, home to the meaty painting Las blogueras: haughty creatures, but grey and anaemic ones, craning their necks to catch the latest trend while they tot up the likes on their social media profiles.
In this canvas Silvia Raquel puts on display some of the elements we can find in a good part of her artworks: compositional freedom, eclecticism in terms of style and a varied choice of subject. Or, to put it bluntly: she does what she feels like and how she feels like doing it.
When they start out, plenty of artists get in a rush to find a style of their own and make a splash in the ever inbred art market. The Argentine artist doesn't have that conflict, she doesn't need to convince anyone of her art, only herself.
We're convinced too by Alta Tensión, another artwork from the collection, an acrylic canvas that's a full-blown explosion of colour and collage.
Messages and cities
In 2013, Silvia Bregar exhibited her collection Mensajes y Comunicación in the Raquel Forner room at the Argentine consulate in Mallorca. This collection includes artworks such as Ellas, trabajan la calle, another protest piece in which colour, texture and collage are once again the leading players. And what can you say about the chromatic din of Primavera: a tongue of colour cutting across a grey surface spattered with white scribbles.
More interesting, perhaps because of how tightly focused its subject is, is the series Ciudades. Nostalgia and tenderness are the emotional notes of these little small-format paintings, where the Argentine works in acrylic on board and canvas.
Silvia Raquel prepares the supports herself so she can "express the strength of the textures freely". This tactile richness in some of the Argentine artist's artworks is one of her virtues, as we see in Ciudad 1 or Ciudad 2.
The Mallorca-based painter also manages to move us with the light touches of colour she uses to tell apart the little houses in these neighbourhoods that carry us back to that time, lost for many of us, of washing lines and windows, alleyways and games.
Silvia was born in Chascomús, a small city in the province of Buenos Aires, and later went to the capital to study. These gentle little paintings are a way of paying tribute to her roots.
Silvia Bregar, a multidisciplinary artist
Although in recent years she seems more given over to painting, Silvia's output also includes sculpture, recycling and the making of furniture and other objects, and even digital art, being a self-declared Photoshop fan, as she admits herself.
We stop at her lovely sculptural series Atrapando el genio, in which the Argentine creator pays subtle, witty homage to several of the great masters in the history of painting: Degas's tutu and ballerina, DalÃ's soft watch, Munch's scream, Warhol's Campbell's soup... and Van Gogh's ear.
There's no doubt that Silvia Raquel Bregar enjoys what she does. "The conventional never stops me, I feel complete freedom of expression... that's why I paint". Feeling free to create, now that's an art.
We invite you to visit Silvia Raquel Bregar's gallery on Artelista.
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