When the everyday becomes an enigma

We might smile at the sight of a party favor baby. But hundreds of them, in all colors, aligned or scattered, floating or framing scenes, create a different effect. Resignified Questions , Silvio Fischbein 's exhibition at the Imaginario gallery, oscillates between bewilderment, discomfort, and fear. Far from being decorative or playful, the artist constructs a universe where the childlike becomes strange and the everyday becomes an enigma.

These are 25 previously unpublished works that seem to have emerged from a mind that archives, classifies, accumulates... but also disassembles, dismantles, and reconfigures. Fischbein starts with banal materials —party favors babies, newspaper clippings in exotic languages, school maps, advertising photographs—and assembles them into obsessively ordered structures. There is something deeply emotional in these compositions ; something that makes one uncomfortable.

Latent and diffuse, this discomfort is the true heart of the exhibition. A passage where childhood ceases to be a refuge , the compulsive repetition of figures and patterns, and the decontextualized elements create an almost hypnotic effect. There is no chaos, but there is no peace either. An order that oppresses, as if each box, each cutout face, conceals a story denied to us.

Even the familiar—a map, a smile, a color—are perceived as alien, as if something has broken inside. Fischbein works with that fracture. He points it out without explaining it, frames it without closing it. Art, then, is not only the visual result, but also that crack that forces us to reexamine certainties . How often do we look without seeing? How often do we associate the childlike with the pure, without paying attention to its disturbing potential?

The series can also be read as a critique of the systems that shape our perceptions : advertising, education, family, religion. There's no pamphlet, but rather an invitation to dismantle narratives.

Babies are the central figure. Their presence is massive, but there is no tenderness, only accumulation. What do they represent? Overpopulation? The divine? The latent possibility of something terrible? Fischbein doesn't provide answers. He only offers open structures for the viewer to fill in the meaning, even if they reject it.

Babies populate his works with ambivalence: Do they represent innocence? An excess of humanity? The need for family planning? Something that hasn't happened yet, but could? The story of how they came to be in his work is already part of the artist's personal myth.

“One day, leaving a museum, I saw a little boy with a rattle just like the one I used. I went to Once, bought a bag of toys, and found some tiny babies that really caught my eye . I went back to the store, contacted the manufacturer, and asked him to sell me all the ones he produced. I ended up buying 20,000 a month for four years,” Fischbein recounts.

Her workshop, visible in a video shown in the gallery, displays baskets filled with chubby, colorful babies, dismembered dolls—a scene fit for a horror film—and classified materials. An archive of the overflow. A mental model of the room containing remnants of a childhood.

The photographs he uses seem cut from a brave new world: advertising smiles , bland scenes of happy people without context. They are faces that say nothing, or that say too much about what they're supposed to show. Added to this are school maps and diaries in languages ​​most people don't understand.

There are white squares, like empty cells in a paused game. Everything harks back to the game of goose, where chance determines whether you advance or retreat. Some works generate a childish temptation: move a piece, roll the dice . But there are no rules. Only the uncomfortable feeling of being trapped in a game whose consequences are unknown.

Perhaps the most poignant work is on the wall. It's a question his youngest granddaughter posed upon seeing one of his paintings: "Babu, so many babies... where are the mothers? " The question echoes the question. What was lost? What's missing? What lies at the center of these structures, as precise as they are desolate?

Fischbein defines himself as a nomadic artist between disciplines. A visual artist, architect, filmmaker, teacher, and former president of the Ibero-American Association of Audiovisual Schools, his visual work is built from the freedom of someone who knows no boundaries.

“The state of creation is a way of life. The workbench isn't a physical place, it's an attitude. I don't impose the meaning of the work; it arises from a negotiation with the person who views it,” he defines.

From this premise, each piece functions as an invitation to dismantle the known world, to see the darkness in the childlike, too. To view the excess of order as potential violence. To understand that in a world filled with images, perhaps the only way out is to look anew.

“I'm probably trying to express a utopia. Differences don't exist, neither do hegemonies or social cultures. We live in a world where we're all equal. And I do it with what I can.”