Galleria Eugenia Delfini attends for the first time ArteFiera Bologna, in the Painting XXI Section curated by Davide Ferri, with a solo show by Caterina Silva (1983, Roma).
Caterina Silva is a painter and performer. She has been an artist in residence at Cité des arts, Paris 2012; Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam 2014-2015; Asia Culture Center, Gwangju 2016; NKD, Dale, Norway 2018 and in 2022 she is the winner of the Italian Council XI Edition-Talent Development research call.
Her work is represented by Galleria Eugenia Delfini in Rome and by Bosse&Baum in London, and has been exhibited in national and international institutions such as Terra, Burgundy, Francia; Plataforma Festival, Santiago de Compostela; Rugby art gallery and Museum, Rugby, UK; Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Roma; Fondazione Giuliani, Rome; Fondazione Pastificio Cerere, Rome; Lateral, Roma; MACTE, Termoli; Fondazione Spinola Banna, Poirino; Casa Testori, Milan; Centrale Montemartini, Rome; Galleria Riccardo Crespi, Milan.
Her painting research investigates the connections between language and power from a silent perspective to elude the canonical structures of meaning production and question broader systems of classification and control.
At Artefiera, she presents a cycle of new medium and large-scale works born from an algorithmic structure.
Silva is well known for her large vertical paintings (140x200 cm) that allow a 1to1 encounter with the viewer and reflect the centrality of her body in the pictorial process.
The artist uses both oil and acrylic paint, painting with saturated colors with pure chromatic tonality and also uses pigments, spray paint, ink, dust, earth, soap and other edible or organic components found in her studio. The canvas itself is also explored by her in its elasticity and texture, in fact some of her works retain traces of the process of stretching, folding and burning as well as the signs of their movement. The result is very vibrant pictorial works with bright tones dominated by the use of shocking magenta (a reappropriation of pink in a queer-feminist key) in which traces of the artist's emotional states are recorded but also transpositions of the collective unconscious that in their abstraction open up to the viewer like musical scores.
Her paintings do not appear as crowded landscapes but as fields of light on which a series of clues have been deposited and large areas of digital white make space to be crossed. The space of the canvas, therefore, could be intended as a threshold or as a space in potential tension and movement.
Working on multiple symbolic levels, Silva reworks different visual traditions and draws inspiration from Helen Frankenthaler's works on wood, Agnes Martin's writings on the emotional and expressive power of art, Hilma af Klint's mystical paintings and the work of artists such as Georgia O'Keeffe, Marisa Merz, Carol Rama and Jutta Koether.
Her pictorial language emerges in an intuitive but controlled manner in the space between her and the canvas. In this relationship, Silva attempts to oppose the classical rules of pictorial composition (order, balance and harmony ect.) and tries to resist the hierarchical and gravitational distribution of the elements on the canvas.
The live gestures that we find in her paintings seem to be the result of a choreographic action, yet they are never aimed at building a specific figuration or event. In this way the narration remains open, vulnerable and undefined, allowing the viewer's eye to move freely and navigate the painting on which abstract signs rhythmically take shape that radiate and never find settlement.
Finally, the canvas acquires the potential to be the only context in which dynamics of power are not experienced but there are expressed only relationships. In fact, each painting offers an opportunity for the artist, but also for those who observe it, to experience autonomy from the form, rules and imposed superstructures.
Silva on one hand uses an alphabet that is not immediately codified in which gestures and signs allude to the completion of form without closing it definitively, and on the other makes a deliberate use of combinations, stratifications and apparently technical expedients which arise from a radical critique of the notion of modernity.
