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White is the primary focus in the chosen works. Often considered a non-colour, white is typically associated with emptiness, silence, suspense, immobility; or linked to weddings, paradise, the ethereal, the pure. For other cultures, it is the colour of death. White is the colour of the bed sheets in a hospital, the pages of book not yet written, the walls of a house not lived in. The colour of the clouds and the whites of our eyes. Light is also generally considered as white, yet it is white that disperses all the colours of the spectrum perceptible to the human eye. White contains sharp yellows, warm reds, sparkling blues, cool violets, forest greens, grass greens, soft pinks, and fiery oranges. The brown of the soil, the grey of smoke, and the blue of the air. White is all of these colours and more, yet at the same time the negation of them.

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 In the works of clouded glass by Silvano Rubino - the seeds on the ground and the classically inspired head on the pedastal entitled Ritratto lying upon its golden plinth - seem like marble, somehow tactile, as though covered in talc or fine dust. Certainly not the crystal clear glass seen so often in everyday life. The multi-chromatic effect of Murano glass is totally consumed by white; the transparency cancelled out by a clouding and dense composition of the material. Research of the essentiality of material, the overcoming of tradition, and the rigour of language drives Rubino's works, resulting in refined, sometimes whimsical, details: the gold leaf angioma on the neck of the sculpture, and the glowing orange sections that provided an unexpected animation in the otherwise sterile white seeds on the floor. The photographs are also predominantly white: Praedica Verbum and My voice is your voice but now tacet, part of the exhibition "I don't speak about silence" from 1996. Stasi neutrale is instead one of the 'chapters' of a more recent photography show in 2014.

Rubino was born in Venice in 1952. After graduating from the Instituto d'Arte with a specialisation in fresco, he attended painting courses from Bruno Saetti and Carmelo Zotti at the Accademia di Belle Arte di Venezia, and until 1984 Rubino worked designing sets and costumes for theatre and dance. As a result the artistic work of Rubino has been, without doubt, influenced by theatrical experience - scene sets, building the visual and dramatic language of installations, photography, video - and thus become key to the comprehension and appreciation of his work. The interest of the artist, besides a diverse use of language and material, follow a dominant trend: the activation of space and the relationship between the environment and the individual, between the work and the public. This often leads to a study of form and plunging into a meaning of a word. The principle material for most of Rubino's sculptures is glass, which is worked on by skilled artisans from Murano who are experts in the techniques of grinding and 'incalmo' that deny the glass of its most traditional associations of high shine and transparency. Instead Rubino's work have a more ambiguously deceptive nature, less obvious and more intriguing.

Most recently, Rubino has exhibited in In equilibrio tra due punti sospesi at Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, 2010; In scala perfetta at Galleria Michela Rizzo, 2006; WhiteWindow at Temporary Gallery, 2013; Fragile Murano at Musée Maillol, 2013; Glasstress New York at MAD, 2012; Glasstress Venezia at Palazzo Cavalli Franchetti, 2009.

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