Vera Eisenberg

"The landscape as visual metaphor has been a permanent theme in Vera Eisenberg's work. Let us consider pictorial language as a vital and creative experience and its significant power (...)"

Rosa Faccaro, AACA - AICA

"(...) the artist also reaches moments of great lyric beauty, as in the truly rhapsodic horizontes, whose different blues show a disturbing interaction of exaltation and strife. An exhilarating show indeed."

Alfredo Cernades, Art critic

"Vera Eisenberg is a painter who transforms landscape elements in her own peculiar manner, painting flame-like trees within fractured neo-cubistic planes and employing a palette of fiery reds and gem-like blues (...)"

Marjorie Perkoff, Critic

THE POWER OF COLOUR

Vera Eisenberg's early years were marked by drama and tragedy, as can be expected of one who was born in Hungary in 1943, when World War II was raging in Europe. Not unexpectedly, she states that her work is impregnated by those terrible memories, even if the Eisenberg family reached a safe haven in Argentina, in 1951.

Then terror and persecutions were left behind for good. And she sought a private refuge and means of expression in art. Besides a stint in the Art Students League in New York she got most of her training from such local masters as Ana Tarsia, Víctor Chab, Kenneth Kemble, Luis Noé, Carlos Cañas. So, it's not surprising that her work shows such tremendous power, although she keeps a personality totally her own. The recent exhibition is ruled by architecture in most cases.

Even so, what first strikes the eye is Eisenberg's magnificent use of color, especially vivid, saturated hues. Then the viewer is immediately drawn to a farrago of shapes that clash violently, combining purely gestual zones with other, neatly designed planes. There is also a thrilling interplay of structures that often veer crazily into cubism or explode like in a Bartok concerto. At times all these elements appear struggling and vying for attention in the same picture. Others remind the viewer of the remains of a fantastic sci-fi metropolis after a nuclear war: a cluster of block – like shapes whose colors stubbornly refuse to fade. This dynamism is often stressed by the irregular, sharply angular format of the surfaces she uses, resorting to diptychs and triptychs. Even so, the artist also reaches moments of great lyric beauty, as in the truly rhapsodic Horizontes, whose different blues show a disturbing interaction of exaltation and strife. An exhilarating show indeed.

Alfredo Cernadas - 2008, Buenos Aires Herald