Written on Water Catalog Essay by John Yau, 1995

THE JOURNEY ITSELF IS THE HOME: THE ART OF LYDIA RUBIO

I.

Lydia Rubio was born in Havana, Cuba, and grew up there during the 1950’s. She has strong memories of her grandmother, who was an artist, and has honored their relationship in the painting, She Painted Landscapes, a dazzling trompe l’oeil work which undercuts its myriad of illusionistic details with both dramatic shifts in scale and open-ended juxtapositions. In She Painted Landscapes, Rubio combines fragments of ordinary reality with the mysterious, often multiple narratives underlying one’s dreams, with the pull of both memory and imagination. Everything jostles together. The viewer cannot say whether the painting is of a dreamscape inhabited by fragments of memory and reality or a realist depiction haunted by memory and fragments recalled from different dreams. Such is the primal power of Rubio’s art; it calls the ordinary into question, as well as compels us to examine our belief that our everyday life is stable enough to withstand change, and that the earth we walk on is solid and dependable. Read the [FULL ARTICLE}