A conversation with the artist Rubén Grau

Silence and vision: a conversation with the artist Rubén Grau
The visual artist and the writer from San Luis held a public talk on various topics: literature, Borges, inspiration and silence as absence.
The conversation takes place at the Universidad Nacional de los Comechingones, in a testimony of a meticulous and reflective approach to his creation. We are at the beginning of December 2024, Rubén Grau is at a decisive moment in his artistic career. With more than four decades of work, the painter, sculptor, poet, this creator of Latin American art seems to never tire of his searches. Born in Buenos Aires in 1959, his work has gone through multiple phases and styles, but always with one constant: the desire to question art, to reflect on the gaze, silence and the word.
In his research, Grau has immersed himself in a deep analysis of libraries, not only as containers of knowledge, but as reflections of the minds of the artists who inhabit them. Books, for him, are a terrain of intervention, exploration and recycling. "What interests me is how the library can become a space of memory," he says, alluding to his fascination with the archives of transcendent artists, such as Clorindo Testa and León Ferrari, whose legacies are found not only in their works, but also in the libraries they have left behind.

The connection with Borges is inevitable, since Grau is attracted by that image of the writer who conceptualizes the library as an infinite world. "For me, the library is a space where ideas cross and overlap, where the border between the public and the private is diluted," he reflects. It is at that crossroads, between memory and interpretation, where he finds his own artistic voice. His first interventions, which consisted of intervening in books with wax and paint, are an echo of this search to dilute the boundaries between what is known and what can be imagined.

Grau's visit to the province was organized by "Al sol productora en arte", a project based in San Luis and San Pablo (in Brazil) that aims at the exchange, dialogue, and exhibition of different actors in the field of contemporary art in the Latin American region.

When delving into his work in recent years, Rubén speaks of the creation process as something that does not follow a strict logic. "It is not rational, it is something that appears to me in dreams or when I wake up," he says, revealing how, in his work in progress process, the work is not something finished, but always open, in constant expansion. This attitude is reflected in his latest retrospective exhibition, El silencio ve, which has been acclaimed for its philosophical depth and its ability to provoke a slow reflection in a world accustomed to immediacy.

In this exhibition presented at the Emilio Caraffa Museum (Ciudad de Córdoba), Grau uses an installation that confronts the viewer with the relationship between the visible and the hidden, between the said and the unsaid. Here, the word does not appear as a linear discourse, but is broken down, hidden, transformed. The books, the interventions, the visual elements in the exhibition are intertwined to create an atmosphere of silence, where the viewer must learn to listen.

In this work, Grau plays with the idea of silence not as absence, but as an active presence that forces us to look beyond the superficial. Silence, in his work, is an invitation to deep reflection, a call to listen to what is not said, to look at what is normally overlooked. It is, in many ways, a critique of the visual and media noise that dominates contemporary society, where images and sounds follow one another quickly without leaving us time to process them.

But perhaps Grau's greatest reflection comes when he talks about the way in which art and the viewer's gaze have transformed over the years. “Art cannot be mediated by screens,” he says in a critical tone. In a time when images are rapidly consumed through social media and digital platforms, Grau’s work proposes a pause, a moment of detention in the dizzying flow of information. “Art must be a space of freedom,” he says, suggesting that the true power of art lies in its ability to offer an immersive experience, one that is not only intellectual, but also sensorial and emotional.

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