As Suzanne Vega sang in I never wear white in 2014 „Black is for secrets / Outlaws and dancers / For the poet of the dark“
In her new series of large-format paintings, Nicola Rubinstein takes up the rebellious theme of that song and celebrates a festival of colours in them. The starting point is the colour black. On the other hand, there is no opposing white colour in her works: so then they become not a competition between the poles, but rather a celebration. Rubinstein rethinks and forms what we often define as opposites: it is only through the presence of black that the other colours can acquire an ecstatic vitality, start a dance in that draws us in, in swirling amazement. Suddenly we wonder how many sounds a black tone can have. Rarely has black been so colourful,"said one observer of Rubinstein's work. So then suddenly you ask yourself—what is black? In our everyday lives in the West, when it is dark, when we are in mourning, or even wearing a particular uniform, we become aware of completely different dimensions: darkness is a part of us, not a low point, but rather a way of pausing and thinking in a way that is the opposite of garish and superficial. That said, Rubinstein's work does not exclude the carefree, but still it compensates for anxiety. Being at the mercy of darkness not only teaches us fear, but at the same time also provides a feeling of security at some level, opens up a sanctuary for dreams, fairy tales and riddles... As Stanislaw Lew wrote in 1984 in “Thus spoke Golem” . "You don't know what happens to a star that sets behind the gravitational horizon, because physics only takes you to the edge of the abyss and stops there.“ All that is left behind is the imagination, our imagination - and where physics ends, that's where painting begins, where Black is for Secrets begins. At the same time a celebration of the materials - painting, collages from objets trouvés, drawing always form dynamic layers - the artist succeeds in creating a pictorial concentration that captures our gaze as it moves ever deeper. Almost intuitively Rubinstein builds cosmic spaces, rhythmical landscapes and figurations, anarchic and archaic situations. The abstraction that sustains it here is not a gesture of refusal, but rather a reference to many things, a step into the possible. Rubinstein gives the unspeakable, the unimaginable, the unrepresentable, the undefinable a presence that can be experienced by us through colour, form and their interaction. And our senses begin to dance, we begin to read in these images and to linger, dreamily, in the colourful shadow of the mysterious... Black is for Secrets - "It's the shade and the shadow / It's the depth into your eye". Anke Paula Böttcher