André Silva – artist’s statement

Regarding the exhibition Em nenhum lugar (In nowhere)

We know that things not always are what they seem to be. We are rational observers, able to perceive the difference between reality and fiction, reality and illusion. Despite this, sometimes we are seduced by the pleasure of willingly suspend our disbelief as if we wanted to reach an agreement between what we know is true and we wish would be reality.

The creation of landscape as an art concept is undoubtedly the responsibility of painting. It has transformed nature into a theme and landscape into a gender that crosses cultural history. The landscape was created and reproduced itself. It was invented and changed at the most celebrated painting ateliers of each historical period. The nature reflected dramatic, magical or religious aspects, but rare were the times when landscape was painted as it really was; yet again, the vast majority of the landscapes painted through art history have never existed. In the beginning the paintings were made from memory, then from some sketches, finally plain airs settled in the countryside to paint at the "scene". The painting invented an ideal landscape, a false one, full of places that never existed, mixing elements of memory and desire on a surface, dreams and social needs.

This exhibition presents a set of mediums – installation, drawing, painting – where André Silva intertwine a combination of “handmade art” with the presence of elements that have a more industrial feeling in its finishing, as it is the case of some sculptural pieces.

The work establishes a relationship with Art History. The works are not "realistic" but it would be wrong to approach them as if they were abstract images. Abstraction is a tradition that understands itself, an evolving relationship with the whole history of painting. It leads to a total autonomy of the work, to reach personal imagination, to refine the highest point of the medium, seeking the purest in its vocabulary: color, shape, relations. The starting point of the work in this exhibition is different. The painting does not seek its full autonomy but a fusion with the reality that can only happen by converting it into a hybrid, an amalgam that searches for references inside and especially outside of the painting itself.

By proposing physical and mental, spatial, sensorial and psychological pathways, the works redirect us to other places, acting upon time and memory through a repetition mechanism of the motifs that we can observe in a range of scales.

The representation of landscape has always been a way of knowing what surrounds us, a way to measure or demonstrate our scientific, aesthetic and moral parameters. If someone "does" landscape, he is as well expressing political views, since the eye is guided by its own training and sensitivity and the will to where directing it. By presenting or omitting, the artist criticizes surrounding and context. By sharpening the eye he provokes readings and uses strategies or aesthetic formulas to gain distance or approach certain problems.

I would say that the landscape is nowhere. - This mise en scène transforms and even more − it upsets the represented images until it converts them into questions. Where exactly lays this landscape? What is its geography like?

André Silva, 2010