Gersony Silva
Português
English

Critics

Transitions-Admitted- Gersony Silva

Unlike mythology's insinuations of wandering the labyrinth that King Minos of Crete ordered Daedalus to design, riddled with pathways arranged in such a complicated manner that a way out could not be found, or the episode of the architect’s fashioning wings from feathers and beeswax for flight with Icarus, who died for not heeding his father - Gersony Silva has passages and transitions in the references of the exhibit Stagings for Icarus navigating toward contemporary aesthetic transitions-admissions constructed in each of their artistic variations.

Unlike mythology’s Daedalus, Icarus or Minotaur, the transitions /strategies featured in Gersony Silva’s Galeria Virgilio exhibit join viewers as variants she devised to frame wings as symbols luring them - she suggests - toward the trajectory of the "great dreamers": a metaphorical reference to the flight of Daedalus and Icarus in their attempted flight from the Cretan labyrinth.

Her exhibits transmute metaphorical possibilities of the instability of making and being, receiving, accepting, admitting and regaining. At the same time, these verbs/actions lead to the semantic and pragmatic aspects of her theme acquiring irrefutable presence. Hence that which Ticio Escobar (2006) describes as a return to engagement of narratives, amalgam of narratives , incursion of social contexts, to the harassing presence of realities or specters of realities.

Through her works, Silva dilutes visual underpinning in arguments, in pure formal values, endlessly reframing from their own language, opening up to the harsh climes of history and its whirlwinds of gales ebbing and flowing, healthily infecting actions with images, discourses, texts, events and statistics sourced from multi- and inter-disciplinary contexts.
Comprehension (as composition of content) and extension (as quantity and relevance of references) are definitions that metabolize the game Silva orchestrates in works beyond the circle of mere representation.

As in Caixa para danças I [case for dances I] (2014), in which intertwined objects and media - a gold-plated metal bough as root holding a wooden case, like a jewelry case, retaining the lightness of Silva's video image of the music box's dancer coiled in the subtlety of a blue line that would be the death of desire, as would the temerity shown by Icarus. Paradoxically the "real" dancer is quite still, facing the mirror fastened to the lid of the case, golden wings protruding from its sides. Myth, symbol and action are implied but constrained, thus admitting sensory additives that alternately dialogue and clash with each other in intense grids. From the latter come (as Daniel Lins notes) bifurcations, easings, accelerations, roads traveled, in short cartography situating happenings in relations to each other, making connections.

Transitions-Admissions (2012) is a screening of Silva's performance on Avenida Paulista that suggests transitioning or passing (being admitted) through an opening to reach freedom. Wings are her means of effecting this transition -admission. Where they will be directed will depend on an individual's actions. Silva challenges everyday life through wings posing cultural forms of liberation amid urban chaos: meanings shared in freely expressive displacements.

Conjoining a multiplicity of different formats and supports - drawings, projections, installations, photographs, paper, fabrics, all variably scaled for the exhibition's outcome, her framing of the themes consolidates that which “[...] moves the domain of the arts from the reign of poetics to that of aesthetics...” The same author designated aesthetics as “[...] a mode of thought that develops with respect to things of art and that is concerned to show them to be things of thought.” (Jacques Rancière, 2009)
In both series - SOBREvôos IX a XXIV (2016/17) and Fendas (2016) [overflights I to XVI and narrow openings] there is a chromatic/structural/sensorial vulnerability that regulates strategies used to represent and show wings as hybrid forms, as strategies or postulates for a cultural convention rather than mere association between object and images.
ANDRÉS I. M. HERNÁNDEZ
Curator - São Paulo Summer 2017