“(…) The color black was almost as present as blue in all of Rabbia’s imagery—emphatically so in Threshold, 2019, a rendering of a spectral silhouette crammed inside a narrow, claustrophobic space. Yet this ambiguous figure plays tricks on the eye, for it appears simultaneously concave and convex—as dense as a marble tombstone and as shallow as an open grave. “Like a nothingness after sunset, black sounds like an eternal silence, without future or hope,” Kandinsky wrote. Not so in Rabbia’s case—her blacks sing, albeit mournfully. The artist’s paintings are successful “compromise formations,” as Freud said of dreams, that reconcile the life and death instincts: the former integrative, the latter disintegrative. One of thereasons her works are emotional as well as aesthetic masterpieces, not to say triumphs of the imagination, is that they make use of the modernist heritage in a singular way. She makes the dialectical terseness of abstract art wonderfully capacious and resoundingly clear. (Donald Kuspit. Excerpt from “Reviews, New York: Luisa Rabbia at Peter Blum Gallery,” Artforum, March 2021)
” (…) In Embrace she has etched a rudimentary face on it, revealing a recumbent head as somnolent as that of Brancusi’s Sleeping Muse (1910). But the bulbous torso presides in these pictures, a bulk as imposing as that of Rodin’s Balzac, its sketchy outline resembling the way Milton Avery handled small-headed bodies in his late portraits. Munch often used this form, as well, to connote an inward-looking alienation and the inability to connect to others, but Rabbia has turned this hunched human form and the fin-de-siècle symbolist blue color scheme of such artists into a signifier of emotional expansiveness not abnegation. Inner secrets emerge and invite you in. Embrace has a celestial quality, with this central glowing planetary body stretched at top and bottom into an oblate shape, one ringed by a human mandorla, and resemblant of one of Agnes Pelton’s luminous, organic, animation cell-influenced orbs, here grown huge. The glowing fingerprints that activate the center of the rounded mass resemble clusters of electric lighting across the earth as seen from space.” (Jason Rosenfeld. Excerpt from “Luisa Rabbia: ‘From Mitosis to Rainbow,” The Brooklyn Rail, December 14, 2020)
