Critics

Gersony Silva’s creative process is a sensitive universe formed by studies, images, intuition, and metamorphoses. Her “artistic doing” has room for several languages: object, photograph, painting, drawing, performance, installation, the mixture and superposition of all of them. Getting intrigued by the shapes and materials, as well as by the unfolding of ideas into new propositions is nodal in her repertoire. The transformation [as in the dictionary, the act or effect of transforming/being transformed] propels her.

The body and, most of all, the artist’s body stands out and is transformed: feet are wings; legs reveal clefts; sweat brings remission, and the discipline of the movement is now freedom. These are metaphors enriched by the duet of the colors blue/red. In the modern paradigm, the body was a stable reference, the place of the being, the reason and the consciousness, a beacon for the composition of identity and subjectivity. In Gersony Silva’s lexicon, the body – as a social, cultural, and symbolic construct – is taken as matter for creation and (re)creation.

Pigment, sweat and nothing else, 2018-2019, besides photographs, is also a disquieting video . With white robes, in an equally white environment, the artist has, in a small bowl, a red pigment that she applies on her feet and hands. The red powder is clearly perceptible, but, little by little, in subtle moves, the red becomes liquid; time reveals the presence of sweat. The excessive sweating of the feet and hands is the agent of the performance – in essence, it is the fluid that comes out of her body that transforms what we see. The mixture of pigment and sweat stains the clothes and the place. The vivid red brings the memory of blood, pain, and discomfort.

In the photographic records of Pigment, sweat and nothing else, 2018-2019, in the selected approach, the emphasis is in the hands of the artist – a body fragment of long metaphoric tradition. The red mixed with the sweat alludes to hands that bleed and stain clothes, ground and everything that is touched. Images that might or might not be accompanied by the video. However, if detached, they cause greater impact and apprehension in the observer. The title of the work might bring relief, yet the “nothing else” is difficult to be assimilated. Would it be a fallacy, an illusion? Is there more than that? The answer might be in an interview given by Silva, in which she declares that “art is the path between the artist and the spectator”, that is, art operates in this interregnum. Therefore, I believe there is more.