Critics

Following Gersony Silva’s artistic research enables me to form a critical positioning in face of her gradual stemming visual constructions. While selecting the works for this exhibition we were careful to have them act as visual manifestos that would categorize an asymptomatic, mutable proposal in what refers to concepts and convictions.

Therefore, in the exhibition at Pinacoteca Benedicto Calixto, Santos - São Paulo, the artist establishes, in her visual manifestos, a parity tensioned in surfaces that generate conceptual fluids deriving from a suggested literality towards the very materiality in the construction of works of art. At the same time, starting from the solid artistic research nurtured from the paths travelled by the artist, the artworks presented here magnetize paths that suggest and wander from what is visible from the body(ies) projected from inside, which pulse sensorially in messages of cry and moves, towards an embodiment and reflexive combination of concept and space.

In the representation postulates that Silva builds and projects, it seems to me that there is a particular mimetic comprehensiveness, first reinforcing ethical postulates to articulate those aesthetic ones in a field intrinsic to the first ones, putting in the spot the logics of representation.
In the artworks of the series Pigment, sweat and nothing else (Pigmento, suor e nada mais), 2018/2019, the artist suggests moves of chromatic and/or spatial fluidity where color is color itself and where archetypes of human culture appear in a simulated way, and erase any symbolic nomenclature to structure themselves as contemporary artistic categories: from sculpture to performance, from photograph to installation, from drawing to painting, as solid visual manifestos. Thus, Silva positions herself in the logics pointed by Didi- Huberman, who states that [. . . ]
Taking a stand is to desire, to demand something, to place yourself in the present and aim at a future. However, all of this exists only over the background of a temporality that precedes us, that encompasses us, calling for our memory even in our attempts of oblivion, rupture, absolute novelty. To know it is necessary to know what you want; however, ´it is necessary, also, to know where to situate our not knowing, our latent fears, our unconscious desires. [...]

In the artworks of the series OVERflights IX to XXIV (SOBREvoos IX a XXIV), 2016/2017, the chromatic/structural/sensorial vulnerability regulates the strategies of the use of representation and description/exhibition of the wings as hybrid forms, strategies understood as postulates of a cultural convention, and not a simple association between the object and the images.

In Tied hands in running waters (Mãos atadas em águas correntes), 2019, as in Noises of silence (Ruídos do silêncio), 2018, the artist reveals how, in her creative process, she questions the formality of narrative structures. It takes place by suffocating explicit interpretations, eminently intensifying numerous and peculiar processual layers of constructing narratives, and by articulating them with the instability and sensorial apprehension of those layers, in what Rosalind E. Krauss defines as drama of movement. A material, presential and metaphoric drama, as in the performance/installation) I’m sorry… my hand is sweating (Desculpe... minha mão está suando), 2015/2019, where there is the conjunction of particular physiognomic processes with the material mutability of the set of elements composing the artwork: the corrosion of the metal due to its reaction to the sweat of the artist, for instance; as well as the unceasing, permanent emulsion of sensory pouring out that highlights what a transcending artwork roots, especially in its transgressive power.