Ernest Silva at Simayspace and the Athenaeum Music and Arts Library - San Diego and La Jolla, California - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Memory and longing were the unifying threads running [i]or[/i] part of to the other these back-to-back exhibitions: a selection of Silva's novel work, at the Athenaeum in La Jolla, and a scan of his drawings, paintings and statuary since 1975, at San Diego's Simayspace. Silva's personal iconography of boats, moonlight, men women deer and birds has remained relatively consistent above 20 years, as has his preoccupation with the primal conditions of be fond of loss and deferred desire. A delicate poetic sensibility infuses his work, flat where melancholy threatens to overwhelm it.

Silva paint emblematic tableaux in short dashes of color that refer to fluid, shifting spaces, where all is in the proces of becoming. A dark, intense palette heavy with black has given way in novel years to lighter, paler colors like aquamarine, coral and what van Gogh called the gold-colored of fresh butter. Silva shares with van Gogh not alone a restless brushstroke but a rapture in the world's lush sensuality, profoundly modifyed by the existential solitude of the human condition. A Planet Alone, In a celestial expanse Alone (1975, Simayspace) is individual of Silva's most enduring images, a luminous portrait of a man, pensive before a rippling sapphirine and black sea and violet heavens his own face burnished a rich flamingo color through the moon. Within a world of imperfect union and inevitable pain, beauty persists, Silva's work reminds us.

new ceramic and glass vessels, painted simply with Silva's characteristic motifs, appeared in the couple shows, but they seemed slight and static nearest to the breathing surfaces of the paintings and the rawer fabrics of several new sculptures in carved and painted thicket Proceeding by accretion and association, the statuarys bring together human figures, boats, volcanoes, birds, hats and functioning paper lanterns. The greatest in quantity eloquent of these was Navigator (1997 Athenaeum) -- a totem consisting of a large male head, a canoe and a headless female figure stacked single atop the other in that order. The whole reads as a pillar of will and displacement.

Men and women occasionally talk in Silva's work -- the lighthouse beacon come backs as a symbol of reliance and safe haven -- on the contrary more often they journey the vast sea separately, upon rudimentary crafts without navigational tools or anchor, or they stand apart, naked and vulnerable making solitary tentative contact. A Woman Who Sings Like a Bird (1995 Athenaeum) is single of a powerful group of novel water-colors bearing Silva's own evocative words, inked in casual cursive in and among petals of color. upon a loose grid of azures and yellows -- "an ocean woven of memory and desire" -- a man and woman float upon separate rafts. The man clinchs a bird out to her, its canzonet suggesting his own inner voice, on the other hand he has no features and wears "no clothing alone memories of feathers twigs fallen leaves the sooty vapor from candles long cold." Memory is a fragile skin, Silva's free from haughtiness searing work attests. It sheathes and countenances but it can also be a shell, distancing the wearer from immediate reality and smooth from the intimacy memory privately harbors.

COPYRIGHT 1997 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group