Critics

Our body is a complex combination of different organs, tissues and systems, all operating in synchronic cooperation to ensure the organism will continue to live. From a biological point of view, this explanation might be enough to answer a question that is satisfied with a standard definition. However, if we approach the issue from a poetic or emotional perspective, many other elements are put under our magnifying glass. We will need to speak about things that are not on the surface, meanings which are unique for each person, senses that emerge and fade according to conditions not always obvious, much less eternal.

The body placed in the world of art multiplies itself into agent, vessel, motive, and as many possibilities as the spirit can conceive of. In Gersony Silva’s work, the body is the starting point of the artistic experimentation. Starting with the reasons that trigger her creations – the artist observes the way the social body inhabits the city, under which circumstances it is suitable, if it is hindered or even barred from existing in the public realm. Silva is also concerned with the symbolic body, and how it is turned into shelter, target, merchandise or fetish. On a subtler level, the body is investigated through processes that are indispensable to life, such as bloodstream or perspiration.

This body that identifies us physically as individuals is a moving body. Even when at rest, on the inside it is the territory of an endless flow of water, blood, nutrients and commands being continuously transported through its intricate geography. On the outside, its motion has also a symbolic and dreamlike character, it also speaks of aspirations that are not located inside or outside itself, but in some intangible, yet decidedly present place.

A body that is gradually formed by each new project – a good way to approach Gersony Silva’s production. In each work a part of it is dissected, or put to the test, or fragmented and re-signified. Underlying all that, whether in a latent or evident state, there lies the motion. Feet are transmuted into wings, and who can deny their walk is able to make us fly? Likewise, the blood that runs in our veins performs a dance whose only witness is the imagination of the artist. In a scale inconceivable for the naked eye, there is also continuous motion among the atoms that form everything in the universe – from oceans to rocks, from grains of sand to hair. Science explains that, due to this transit, practically everything we understand as solid is actually a collection of great extensions of emptiness; but, if these voids are passages, they lead, potentially, to other places. The same way a fissure can hide an abyss, it can also mean a new beginning, a “birth”. Nothing we conceive of is definite, and everything that seems to be still is actually moving in this tireless ballet of ideas, dreams, and even the structure of matter itself. Somehow, all things end up following the same restless logic.

Metabody seems to be an appropriate term for the works gathered in this show, some of which were specially produced for the occasion. There is a common thread connecting them, establishing relations around this metabody. Nevertheless, this communication is not necessarily carried out in the same language; if we engage into each work, we might feel that some of them allude to a physical body as a pulsating organism, others to an imagined body (which doesn’t leave out its search for the sacred), whereas others are bodies nurturing their interrelation with the earth-body, of a more feminine nature. It is recommended to breathe consciously and let your own body set the rhythm to experience the fruition.