TEXTS / ESSAYS

This section brings together writings that accompany Felipe Schiffrin’s artistic practice: poetic reflections, short essays, and curatorial texts that dialogue with his visual work.  

They are fragments of the same process, thinking painting from within, inhabiting its silence, and allowing words to emerge with the same slowness as form.

THE MEANING OF THE VOID

But even in the thickness of night,

shapes suggest a face, a door,

a path waiting to be seen.

Not all that is black is emptiness.

Not all that is white is light.

What will you do with this mystery?

CRACKS

Between light and shadow,

small cracks appear:

echoes of a gesture made,

a trace that does not fade.

MATTER AND SILENCE

In Felipe Schiffrin’s work, matter does not assert itself—it withdraws.

The visible arises from restraint, from a gesture that finds in silence its most exact form.

His paintings do not seek to represent but to sustain a state of attention.

Each surface seems to contain a movement that has been paused, as if time itself had found a point of suspension there.

Black and white—his essential poles—act as fields of resonance.

Between them, the image becomes a boundary, a breath, a line dissolving.

There is a tension between appearance and disappearance, between the density of pigment and the transparency of emptiness.

His practice is a meditation on perception: how to see without naming, how to listen to matter before it becomes meaning.

Within that stillness, the work opens as an inner space where silence is not absence, but extended presence.

ON THE DISSOLUTION OF FORM

Every form, as it appears, also begins to vanish.  

Its existence is a brief moment between emergence and loss.  

In my practice, that interval is where the image lives: a breath that seeks not to hold, but to remember its impermanence.  

I work with black and white as edges of the same vibration, as borders that reveal what cannot be seen.  

There, matter becomes thought, and thought becomes matter dissolving. 

Painting does not represent, it breathes.

It does not describe an object, but a sensation of time, a trace of memory still burning on the surface.  

To form and to undo are simultaneous gestures.  

What remains is the imprint of what is no longer there, a question suspended in the space of silence.