PRESENTATION: Rita Fischer-Open Skies
Rita Fischer’s work can be associated with a renewed approach to the landscape tradition, although the horizon and perspective, the fundamental and defining elements of the genre, are not present in her paintings. The artist uses the tonal variety and chromatic complexity to represent elements of nature: plants, branches, leaves or tree bark that remind of the indigenous forests of the Uruguayan countryside.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Xippas Gallery Archive
Far from seeking realism, Rita Fischer’s elements and signs do not provide a complete representation of these thickets, and the feeling of symbiosis in the face of nature does not seem to come. On the contrary, these signs are linked and completed by purely abstract elements, such as the large marks and colour planes which have a significant place in Rita Fischer’s works.
The exhibition “Open Skies” brings together the works by Rita Fischer. This new solo show at Xippas gallery includes works produced on multiple supports—wood panels, paper, and, in her most recent pieces, a return to the traditional canvas on stretcher.
These paintings continue to explore spaces of ambiguity and uncertainty. Although certain visual elements or the presence of some forms may suggest a renewed possibility of representing nature, the landscape, or the density of the native forest, once again nothing truly seems to confirm that figurative intention. All that exuberant unfolding of forms and colors never quite crystallizes into elements that might suggest a narrative we could somehow unravel or analyze. These works seem to fold in on themselves, absorbing every word that attempts to describe them, while at the same time projecting a kind of beauty that language is incapable of articulating.
Though the artist continues to explore the materiality of painting, her use of the ancient technique of tempera allows her to create a subtly mineral surface that also becomes a metaphor for the tireless pursuit of balance. Everything these works display escapes the written word.
The paintings produced by Rita Fischer in recent years appear as a natural promise: that in the future we will invent a new language containing the most precise and equitable synonyms.
In that sense, perhaps everything written up to this point seems a vain exercise in rhetoric; nevertheless, so as not to surrender to the defeat and impotence of writing, let us recall Michel Foucault’s formula: the relationship between language and painting is an infinite one.
To make up for language’s inadequacy in relation to these paintings, we once again turn to the equally inexhaustible tradition of ekphrasis, where everything is pure narrative fiction. Thus, this text could end by returning to its beginning: the deep and hermetic beauty of these works unfolds as an infinite offering—a universe where beauty, morally perfect, is equitable because it is the perfect image of nature, that is, of biological geography, where life and death are eternally intertwined and where culture, with its destructive language, cannot enter.
An undefined space, without sky or earth, inhabited by the infinite pulse of existence that endlessly renews itself—offering us, in this way, the ultimate experience of the Sublime. Nature as a despotic yet humble divinity, eternally awaiting us in silence.
Photo: Rita Fischer, Sin título, © Rita Fischer, Courtesy the artist and Xippas Gallery
Info: Curator: Manuel Neves, Xippas Gallery, Ruta 104, 5km Manantiales, Departamento de Maldonado, Uruguay, Duration: 28/12/2025-21/2/2026, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 15:00-19:00, www.xippas.com/
