I wanted things that I couldn't at times articulate.
by Laura Smith
I wanted things that I couldn't at times articulate.
Helen Frankenthaler
Composed of an evolving alphabet of distinctive, nonfigurative forms, Caterina Silva’s paintings explode the structures of power that exist between language and authority, meaning and control. Through her abstracted and highly gestural brushwork she creates and explores the potential of non-codifiable and non-cooptable means of communication. In so doing, her works demonstrate how language and authority are intricately connected and constructed, and as such, latently dismantle-able.
The forms within Silva’s paintings and performances also reflect on the canon of art history as an authored and authorised narrative, which for a long time barred the work of women. Her works call to mind those paintings and painters that had been excluded, they shimmer with the energies of Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Carol Rama, Etel Adnan, Hilma af Klint, Joan Mitchell and many others, assimilating an array of historical references that have been – and continue to be – inspirational. These influences are combined with Silva’s personal memories, mythologies, and activist politics. What results is an entirely new corpus of glyphs and ciphers that tell a new story, one that is outside of the existing constructs of everyday language and simultaneously capable of incorporating the very histories that it has excluded. This endeavor finds resonance with the words of Catherine Clément and Hélène Cixous in The Newly Born Woman: ‘there is a voice crying in the wilderness – the voice of a body dancing, laughing, shrieking, crying. Whose is it? The voice of a woman, newborn and yet archaic, a voice of milk and blood.’
You have mystery service ahead, and you will soon enough realise what is expected of you.
HIlma af Klint
Of her work, Silva comments that she is interested in ‘what escapes language and its classification and control systems,’ she seeks to emphasise the feelings of powerlessness and discomfort that being outside of language generate, in order to ‘investigate the relationship between power and language and to question the violence of representation from a silent and non-discursive perspective.’ This has led her to develop her alphabet of gestures and forms that doesn’t have a clear and rational translation but allows her to create paintings that are open and available to the interpretation of the observer. She wants to find ways of using language in a non-appropriating way, receptive to endless interpretation and evolution. Such a (mis)use of the system of language is significant when thinking about Silva’s work from a feminist perspective, as Julia Kristeva comment: ‘to use language is to use a masculine system—and that means that in using language, women are always making a compromise of their own subjectivity.’ Through her production of an alternative and highly personal language, Silva therefore disrupts the authority of masculine language and refuses to compromise her own subjectivity.
The body of works titled Impressioni (2018) all reflect the intuitive processes through which Silva absorbs and articulates her surroundings (physical, emotional and historical) as data without a clear code. In this series, Silva translates her observations, feelings and reactions to certain places, times and daily routines into a set of gestural strokes. The paintings incorporate pigments, oil paint, spray-paint and ink, alongside dust, soil, roasted barley, turmeric, curcuma, liquorice, soap and other organic materials that she happened have around her; their brushstrokes escape identifiable language – and its definitions and hierarchies – and as such the works create a non-cooptable and highly feminist system that is unable to be pinned down.
A painting to me is primarily a verb, not a noun, an event first and only secondarily an image.
Elaine de Kooning
In addition to her painting, another aspect of Silva’s artistic practice is her work with performance. For her the two mediums are not distinct but intricately and importantly connected. Performance offers a means for Silva to detach the act of painting from the processes of production, the materiality of the art object and the implications of the market. Her performances deliberately use the gestures – or alphabet – of her paintings, but without the paint and in somebody else’s hands. As she comments: ‘the gestures in both my in-studio [painting] process and during live events are at the same time spontaneous and hyper-mediated. In both cases controlled chance plays a role.’ Her performances generally employ a range of participants, each given five or so actions that represent translations of her painting process into bodily movements. The performers are free to reinterpret these actions according to their physical and imaginative possibilities. Rehearsals are generally kept to a minimum to encourage improvisation and spontaneity but each performer is asked to stick to their determined set of movements in a manner that is straightforward, direct and recognisable by the audience. In this way the power of Silva’s performances exists in the interactions between the individual performers and between the performers and the viewer. If Silva’s paintings are the generation of a new, feminist language, her performances present it in use, functioning, operational and highly subjective.
Silva’s work with performance has also deepened her own understanding of her paintings. For her, her paintings now operate as absent performances and this has intensified her recognition of their muteness and ability to provide different means of communication: ‘I have started to stretch the canvases and to reduce everything to the surface of the painting’, she states. ‘I like the silent feeling that a painting on the wall instills in the viewer.’ The notion of the painting as an absent performance has pushed Silva to treat her activity upon the surface of the canvas almost as an event. She unstretches and restretches her paintings, rolls them up, reworks them by painting on both their sides or repurposes elements of old works. She utilises various household materials and layers myriad textures using frottage, pouring and folding, often she obliterates whole passages of paint with a washing machine or by submerging the work into the ocean or another body of water. The series Self-Portrait of a Landscape 2 (2018), created in Norway, incorporates snow and moss onto the surfaces of the works. And in Diary of a Space (2018-19), she uses frottage so deftly that the canvases become real time transcriptions of the studio surrounding her.
In these ways, Silva masters controlled randomness. The forms, glyphs and ciphers that appear on her canvases are impressions; traces of places, particular times, historical influences, personal memories and her own politics which she allows to enter her paintings and performances without codification or obfuscation. In this way her work offers a proposition, she proposes an alternative narrative – along with the new language through which to tell it – one that disrupts traditional means of authority and control and celebrates subjectivity, multiplicity and silence.
1 Catherine Clément and Hélène Cixous in The Newly Born Woman, 1975
2 Julia Kristeva, The Severed Head: Capital Visions (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism), 2011
by Laura Smith
I wanted things that I couldn't at times articulate.
Helen Frankenthaler
Composed of an evolving alphabet of distinctive, nonfigurative forms, Caterina Silva’s paintings explode the structures of power that exist between language and authority, meaning and control. Through her abstracted and highly gestural brushwork she creates and explores the potential of non-codifiable and non-cooptable means of communication. In so doing, her works demonstrate how language and authority are intricately connected and constructed, and as such, latently dismantle-able.
The forms within Silva’s paintings and performances also reflect on the canon of art history as an authored and authorised narrative, which for a long time barred the work of women. Her works call to mind those paintings and painters that had been excluded, they shimmer with the energies of Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Carol Rama, Etel Adnan, Hilma af Klint, Joan Mitchell and many others, assimilating an array of historical references that have been – and continue to be – inspirational. These influences are combined with Silva’s personal memories, mythologies, and activist politics. What results is an entirely new corpus of glyphs and ciphers that tell a new story, one that is outside of the existing constructs of everyday language and simultaneously capable of incorporating the very histories that it has excluded. This endeavor finds resonance with the words of Catherine Clément and Hélène Cixous in The Newly Born Woman: ‘there is a voice crying in the wilderness – the voice of a body dancing, laughing, shrieking, crying. Whose is it? The voice of a woman, newborn and yet archaic, a voice of milk and blood.’
You have mystery service ahead, and you will soon enough realise what is expected of you.
HIlma af Klint
Of her work, Silva comments that she is interested in ‘what escapes language and its classification and control systems,’ she seeks to emphasise the feelings of powerlessness and discomfort that being outside of language generate, in order to ‘investigate the relationship between power and language and to question the violence of representation from a silent and non-discursive perspective.’ This has led her to develop her alphabet of gestures and forms that doesn’t have a clear and rational translation but allows her to create paintings that are open and available to the interpretation of the observer. She wants to find ways of using language in a non-appropriating way, receptive to endless interpretation and evolution. Such a (mis)use of the system of language is significant when thinking about Silva’s work from a feminist perspective, as Julia Kristeva comment: ‘to use language is to use a masculine system—and that means that in using language, women are always making a compromise of their own subjectivity.’ Through her production of an alternative and highly personal language, Silva therefore disrupts the authority of masculine language and refuses to compromise her own subjectivity.
The body of works titled Impressioni (2018) all reflect the intuitive processes through which Silva absorbs and articulates her surroundings (physical, emotional and historical) as data without a clear code. In this series, Silva translates her observations, feelings and reactions to certain places, times and daily routines into a set of gestural strokes. The paintings incorporate pigments, oil paint, spray-paint and ink, alongside dust, soil, roasted barley, turmeric, curcuma, liquorice, soap and other organic materials that she happened have around her; their brushstrokes escape identifiable language – and its definitions and hierarchies – and as such the works create a non-cooptable and highly feminist system that is unable to be pinned down.
A painting to me is primarily a verb, not a noun, an event first and only secondarily an image.
Elaine de Kooning
In addition to her painting, another aspect of Silva’s artistic practice is her work with performance. For her the two mediums are not distinct but intricately and importantly connected. Performance offers a means for Silva to detach the act of painting from the processes of production, the materiality of the art object and the implications of the market. Her performances deliberately use the gestures – or alphabet – of her paintings, but without the paint and in somebody else’s hands. As she comments: ‘the gestures in both my in-studio [painting] process and during live events are at the same time spontaneous and hyper-mediated. In both cases controlled chance plays a role.’ Her performances generally employ a range of participants, each given five or so actions that represent translations of her painting process into bodily movements. The performers are free to reinterpret these actions according to their physical and imaginative possibilities. Rehearsals are generally kept to a minimum to encourage improvisation and spontaneity but each performer is asked to stick to their determined set of movements in a manner that is straightforward, direct and recognisable by the audience. In this way the power of Silva’s performances exists in the interactions between the individual performers and between the performers and the viewer. If Silva’s paintings are the generation of a new, feminist language, her performances present it in use, functioning, operational and highly subjective.
Silva’s work with performance has also deepened her own understanding of her paintings. For her, her paintings now operate as absent performances and this has intensified her recognition of their muteness and ability to provide different means of communication: ‘I have started to stretch the canvases and to reduce everything to the surface of the painting’, she states. ‘I like the silent feeling that a painting on the wall instills in the viewer.’ The notion of the painting as an absent performance has pushed Silva to treat her activity upon the surface of the canvas almost as an event. She unstretches and restretches her paintings, rolls them up, reworks them by painting on both their sides or repurposes elements of old works. She utilises various household materials and layers myriad textures using frottage, pouring and folding, often she obliterates whole passages of paint with a washing machine or by submerging the work into the ocean or another body of water. The series Self-Portrait of a Landscape 2 (2018), created in Norway, incorporates snow and moss onto the surfaces of the works. And in Diary of a Space (2018-19), she uses frottage so deftly that the canvases become real time transcriptions of the studio surrounding her.
In these ways, Silva masters controlled randomness. The forms, glyphs and ciphers that appear on her canvases are impressions; traces of places, particular times, historical influences, personal memories and her own politics which she allows to enter her paintings and performances without codification or obfuscation. In this way her work offers a proposition, she proposes an alternative narrative – along with the new language through which to tell it – one that disrupts traditional means of authority and control and celebrates subjectivity, multiplicity and silence.
1 Catherine Clément and Hélène Cixous in The Newly Born Woman, 1975
2 Julia Kristeva, The Severed Head: Capital Visions (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism), 2011