The matinal imagination of Julio Silva

The hand works in a whirlwind. It is the eye of the cyclone, propelled by the visionary force at the core, wanting to spend itself, to expand. Julio Silva paints of visceral necessity, wholly invested with the plasmatic force inside him and a dionysiac trust in the primal drive. Behind that hand, fundamental psychic dynamics connect with the energy at the root of creation, the imagination of the womb, of the first matinal light of genesis. Swarming and expansive, this fecundity seizes the pigment, the primordial magma, to sprout an admirable progeny. Silva never sketches in his paintings. There is no planning ahead for this genesis, only an expressive impetuousness, a glance inside or beyond, a movement of body and soul through which the story and the scene are conceived in one fell swoop. Each of Silva’s paintings depicts apparitions sprung from a rhapsodic impromptu that suggests, directs and consummates itself in the same moment. Each painting is born of a fabulation that spills forth a staggering parade of spectres. The successful outcome of this overflowing strangeness, this manipulation of the chimerical, is dependent on the element of surprise, which first of all bowls over the painter himself. It is this trust in his instinct, this urge to visualize the subliminal message that keeps Silva from getting comfortably ensconced in any style, relying on easy dexterity, or converting his driving force into a mannerism. To avoid this, and any other traps of habit that tend to freeze the signs and turn them to stereotype, so that the spell does not become strategic, Silva must stay in a perpetually regressive motion. This brings him back to the source to restore the freshness of virginal vision, inject him again with the primal force which has more do with the known than with the unknown.

Silva manages to come back with his hands full of what was there before his hands. Composition and figures are naturalized to the maximum, conceived as indivisible one from the other. More than a technical process, Julio Silva’s painting is a mythic act of birth through dream. Each canvas is a secret, moving theatre of dreams. A haphazard catch hauled up from the abyss. He endeavours to show or put to light the splay of images surging and swelling in his deepest wells, inside and beyond the heart of this fantastic geyser. A canvas like “Tropics on every floor” brings you back to communion of the beginning where all was linked together the near with the far, the minute with the gigantic, he brings us back to the gushing promiscuity of our origins. A sagittal fish, half-bird, halfstone knife, aiming for the squarish torso of a puppet who stares wide-eyed at the fruitwoman with her breasts like apples. She steps out of a thicket, a teeming jungle of biomorphic beings. In this miraculous universe, foliage combines with the polyhedric, the larval melds with crystal, forms propagate incestuously, driven by the protoplasmic madness of a lush and jubilant vitality.

Silva digs into what lies beneath but does not come up with morbid for malformed monsters. His is not a place for the nauseous, nor the perverse. Silva’s world is more akin to pantomime than to the grotesque, with a seemingly paradisiac candour. His paintings are like offerings, or like syblings. They give a vision or a scenic and rather pleasant “veduta”. The figures inhabiting them are personified, in possession of a full an expressive presence. They are individuals. Silva gives them communicative emotions. As we look at them, they look back with their lively or sometimes melancholy eyes; they watch us in order to captivate us.

The awakening” is a full frontal scene on a horizontal base. And in relation to this floor, the figures levitate or gravitate. Even more, they penetrate and pass though each other because they enjoy an interim state of being, where they are plastic, before form. They exist in the time of a brief rest from the relentless throes of hybridization and metamorphosis. They are free to exchange their qualities and characteristics, for here everything is transitory, transmutable, in transfer, part of this perpetual mutation of appearance and consistence. Forms mottle and spread, contract and expand in search of a delicate balance which by definition is found in the heart of the tumult. The creatures order their existence, organize by themselves, each one deciding on their personal role. They proliferate until they reach and integrate into a harmonious whole, and when it all reaches the right cohesion, they alone give the sign that all is complete. Silva has but to comply with this, and consider the painting finished.

Silva’s visions do not figure, they prefigure. They spark an imagination which existed before any preoccupation with categories, the aesthetics of solids or the definition of stable bodies. They are not nominative, they are descriptive or verbal. They are captured by this point of reciprocal transfusion, inhabited by the indefatigable masks of Proteus, and the thousand eyes of Argos, the point where contradictions are resolved, the orphic point where the sum of all potential rests intact, where everything is compatible, sympathetic.

As much a fan of the circus as of the carnival, Silva unleashes a plethora of marvels. For Silva, this enchanted comedy, “commedia dell’arte”, is a waking dream where characters swap their strange disguises and alternate between the stage and the audience. A grand buffoon, Silva displays his spectacular repertory of comic operas played by a rollicking animal menagerie. Since this is theatre, he sets up his canvases like stages, with curtains, props and different levels where the characters pose as in a living scene. They pose within a fictitious space, ambiguous, both interior and exterior, somewhat cubical, as a wood or a pavilion. It is a space with abnormal perspective, with bogus focal points, deformable at will, which closes, opens, twists or takes on facets it fantasizes. A utopian space, it transfigures itself. It is everywhere and nowhere. It occupies space without the space of desire. Julio Silva takes it in and disposes it in his way; in his painting, desire can go where it will, and do as it pleases.

Sal Yurkievich
Translated from the spanish by Timothy McGlue