Poetic Minutes
Studio visit
Artist Edu Silva
“Poetic Minutes is a text-plot, an affection and a thank you for the welcome, the teachings and the crossroads of life.
Ata poética is listening, cutting, patchwork of speech, narrative, montage, creative construction. Making the other get lost and find themselves in their own voice.
Working material and method of affection, script of the act, the color and the scene. ”
Weaver's gift.
January 21st, 2025.
Edu spoke for about an hour and ten minutes
Fabio - we're in our seventh, eighth year since the beginning... What else! A lot happens here
Between paints, easels, paintings, research.
Therapy sessions, artist talks, the processes end up crossing paths
Color, matter, person.
Edu Silva
The process is private (but it's also collective)
It was a different São Paulo. I grew up hearing from my parents: son, you need to work.
And being an artist wasn't a plan. Although I already had a certain manual skill
Life in relation to the journey; two, three hours to get somewhere
A body that moves between borders
In the coming and going of this plot in transit, the gaze that observes social segregation.
At thirty
A turning point
Painting begins to make sense
And I meet my peers.
Edu, staring at one of us, says: I'm interested in the abstract.
The abstract gives it back to you, it makes sense.
Like an open field of color,
The intersection of interpretations
Subjectivity intertwined.
When Edu works, he paints
The line, the tear; maps, landscapes, scenery, you
Being an artist means learning to negotiate with the material, how much of each color?
I learned to work in series,
I've learned a lot by observing borders
Reading essential things
In my work, my body thinks about dividing spaces
What isn't said, but everyone feels, and knows, and I've lived it, on my skin
Each side, uneven and abstract.
Passing blue, full
Chromatic vibration
Color that is movement and path
Which carries powerful information, translates as formal force
Work that leads me to possibilities of reflection
I seek the minimum
I work with acrylic, Fabio works with oil paint
But I like something fast
Painting talking about painting
The whole body present in space
- Are you going for oil?
Marble, cardboard, acrylic,
Linen - thread
We are surrounded by conservatism
Noble - bum
And in this division of what is good and right
I opted for cardboard, it was a choice, a pact.
A between
A dialog with space
All this time to see the black body that I am
Between
Questions of public notices, how to make the work circulate, how to articulate the work in the world?
Conflicts, insecurity, fears, doubts,
Shared subjectivity, the color of repetition, of toil, of body and matter
That blend together
Family beliefs, whitened
What's going on? (inside me)
Woven from Africa, Tupi, Italian, black and indigenous.
And it's not enough just to paint
There was a time when I went to be a listener
It was a match with Denise Dias Barros
Then, in between, I discovered that brown doesn't exist
The cubes, that's the place you can't stand
To raise an argument
To position oneself
The package of beauty and closures. Pact, contrasts.
Permanent creation and re-creation, the work happens
In repetition, gradually, patiently.
Remnants, impressions, standardization.
Body without color.
...Until Self-Portrait 40, no place.
Reconnection with... blackness, with whiteness
I even think I'm handsome and everything's fine!
What I know is the power of cardboard, or marble
Or when you're in an art institution
Negotiation and modes of preservation
Peeling. Peeling. Covering up. Select. Choose.
Silence.
Edu and metaphors. Lines and borders, reliefs.
How to get in and out of each other's houses!
How to be between two forces?
And stay there, work, image, communication
Handling cardboard
Light that anticipates and foresees
Half alone
Or with everyone, so many pairs and lives
Where do things go?
This technical thing,
The compromise,
The key,
With a gallery, let it be good
Without a gallery, just as good
My question is whether it makes sense
If there are too many problems
The work triggers the questions
Made of poetry and revolution.
Body-screen
Alexandre Heberte
January 23, 2025.
Corollary
(or Through color-habitat, color-trajectory, world-echoes)
At first, it's just the typical tools of a young painter going about his daily work. In the background, dogs bark and the daily bustle of children playing in the streets, lanes and hillsides between Vila Nair and Alto do Ipiranga, in the southeast of São Paulo. On the walk between the subway station and the studio, in an old picture frame factory, there are houses, small commercial warehouses and new items, which are increasingly present. Plots of land in an incessant dismantling of old buildings, ruins, a somewhat white, somewhat stony dust that permeates different environments. Like beige spikes, powerless monochromes, totems reinforcing a stillborn architecture, the new buildings repeat themselves monochordically, throwing vehicles into the narrow streets. The changing panorama results in an intermediate landscape, now common in the new urban agglomerations of the global South.
Flanked by other artists, most of whom are also fond of brushes, canvases, invoices, chromatic thoughts and gestures, Edu Silva produces with persistence in the pictorial field - that is, paintings that can be both two-dimensional pictures that represent language for a long time, but also somewhat risky experiments with language through space, such as the unprecedented cube-objects that he presents in Corolário, his first solo show at Luis Maluf Galeria.
Roughly speaking, the title of the show refers to a thought or consequence derived from a premise, from a previous idea.
Far from just a formal conception, highlighting the uninterrupted research, within a daily discipline, of a customary doing, sheds light on the artist's body of work. The fields of color in constant clashes, on surfaces that are sometimes smooth, sometimes permeable, blend together in processes that are sometimes slower and, once on the chassis, can manifest stronger colors that trace their robustness through graphic delimitations. Both on generous scales and in 'chamber' sizes, the lines configure territories, archipelagos, continents and topologies of colors, planes and volumes that unfold like poetic cartographies at the service of a shifting, non-conforming visuality.
Some series, however, exasperate what could only be a harmonious tone. Through procedures and formal constructions, Silva's poetics combines elements that, already through another layer of reading, connect with his condition as an artist from the peripheries who discusses the racial issue in Brazil.
In a country that hides its violent slave-owning past - let's think, for example, of truly horrifying terms like 'cordial racism', just to mention etymologies - and its marked social inequality, the creation of Resistências (2019), in which cardboard in a fairly common kraft color is arranged next to a polished marble, in a constructive-looking piece, provokes other readings than just those of visuality. There are also works in which areas that are somewhat beige, somewhat ochre, are close to tears due to the more irregular edges. In others, the nobility of the linen escapes from being a mere receptacle for paint and becomes not only a background color. In 1979 (2019), objects escape two-dimensionality in glass boxes that house tiny circles of opaque brown. With each movement, a new arrangement. This series, together with others like it, puts the artist's research at the service of very poignant current discussions.
Memory is another relevant vector in Corolário. The cube-objects, entitled Entre (2020), which are three-dimensional and also have a more expanded pictorial style, can be linked to the artist's childhood, close to his marble-working father, in playful moments. And if we look at the paintings in the strict sense, the paints, textures and materials that occupy, draw and spread out also seem to mark out paths, establish routes, attest to processes and moments in long or routine journeys. Before becoming a designer and artist, he worked in various jobs far from where he lived - in one example, from the outskirts of Embu to Faria Lima every day. Thus, displacement is a central concept in Edu Silva's production, which brings his work closer to contemporary peer practices. “The artist has become the prototype of the contemporary traveler, the Homo viator, whose passage through signs and formats refers to a contemporary experience of mobility, displacement, crossing” [1], argues Bourriaud. “Shifting the point of view and the conventions on the basis of which we think about things is, in fact, the most fruitful of all possible transformations” [2], analyzes Careri.
In these days of obscurantism in public debate and anti-intellectualism on a global level, among other misfortunes, celebrating the consistency of Silva's research reminds us of brilliant propositions such as the world echoes by Edouard Glissant (1928-2011) - whose legacy, by the way, was worked on in a unique way in Manthia Diawara's video installation Por um novo barroco de vozes (2021) at the 34th São Paulo Biennial. “The only stability manifested in Relação concerns the solidarity of the cycles at play, the correspondence of the drawings of its movement. Analytical thought is invited to construct sets, whose solidary variations reconstitute the totality of the game. These ensembles are not models, but reveal echoes of the world. Thought composes music” [3], reveals the Martinique-born thinker.
Yes, thought can compose music, form perspectives that overflow, create worlds that echo not only noises, frictions and fundamentalisms. Accurate and non-obvious glances from the particular poetic material of Edu Silva, who, skillfully dealing between containment and expansion, delimitation and insurgency, demarcation and spreading, anonymity and authorship, brilliantly manages to overcome the intermediate landscapes that strike and meet us with frightening speed. Mario Gioia, August 2022
Mario Gioia, August 2022
Beyond the field of color
In a first interpretation of Edu Silva's work, I think that the artist's discursive material, at first, would be the painting itself. But the accumulation of colors that end up lulling viewers into a state of contemplative comfort appears as a kind of pretext to capture the viewer in a second discursive layer present in his work: is it possible to talk about racial issues in a subjective way? By establishing tensions and harmonies between the use of colors, the artist creates metaphors to reflect on such social issues as race, mestizaje and social vulnerability, suggesting that his paintings are not entirely devoid of a political discussion.
Edu's paintings are created from a predominant color and others that are established in a complementary way, making his experimentation with color a complex pictorial treatment. Although they harmoniously coexist on the canvas, behind this possible peaceful/passive coexistence, there is a point made by the artist that for one color to impose itself, others need to be downgraded. For the main color to stand out, it almost expels the others from the painting. In this way, Edu metaphorically suggests a reflection on the structural racism embedded in Brazilian society.
But discussions of race and social vulnerability don't just permeate chromatic discussions. In Edu's geometric abstraction, the lines establish a discussion about the territorial boundaries that separate the center from the outskirts, creating transit limits that are not only physical, but also psychological, emphasizing these issues in the lines that represent these boundaries in his painting.
Thus, by establishing these parallels, opting for non-figuration, Edu Silva gives us the thought that there is much to be perceived beyond the image. That's why it's interesting to think how the artist masterfully evokes minimalist thinking to portray such brutality imposed on the margins. A point outside the curve, but immensely important for putting such discussions into other perspectives.
Carollina Lauriano
edu silva: marginal landscape
At first glance, it seems easy to understand what Edu Silva's paintings are about. Immediately reading the canvases, the saturated hues reverberate in the eyes, presenting large areas of dense, flat colors that overlap in opposition, clashing forces in front of the canvas. They contrast in intense shades, always carrying a place mark, the trace of an imaginary line of paint, which formalize zones of color. Heavy elements, grouped as simply as possible.
The top view, which seems to be that of an airplane window, makes it possible to photograph the geographic stretch through the retina of the eyes, a piece of land that resembles the visuality of a map that makes territorial demarcations visible through textures, foliage and territorial tracings, stipulated by properties, or by geography itself. The possibilities are endless, but the unity of the painting is given by the relationship between the colors. It is the sensation of seeing from above, chromatic territories, pigmented regions, that make the artist's work take on the character of a landscape.
The protagonist of the work is color. The moment a color establishes itself as the dominant pattern while other colors occupy smaller areas, bordering on the margins of the painting, there is a confrontation. It is in the clash, in the impetuous encounter of two chromatic fields, that lines and geometric shapes emerge, which seem to define and delimit the colored zones from one another, suggesting boundary lines, borders of the extension of color and, consequently, a marginal landscape.
If we think of these demarcations as borders, which metaphorically create a separation between the dominant and the dominated, vying for space on the flat area of paint on the canvas, we are also struck by the reflections of this for a social reading of the territorial disputes latent in contemporary times. It was as a process that the artist drew on his experience of being between the margins, between routes, journeys and daily commutes. The landscape inhabited his gaze and trained his perception to understand the concept of limits and crossings. It is the social margins that bring to the artist's consciousness his place of speech and pictorial activity.
Núria Vieira
from conversations with Edu Silva
The so-called non-places, for Marc Augé, are like a passing-space, unable to shape any kind of identity. Edu Silva is a painter of skins; paintings, writings of color-layers and intervals-between-thelines.
Painting-flesh-bone-viscera!
Brown, they say it’s a color. Color of skin. It doesn’t exist in the color scale, but in the fleshy-paintings of Edu Silva. In the paintings in which LIFE pulses. Abounds. In the excavated paintings composed of material forms of art and life. With no concession.
Edu, since his first works, has been debating with other Latin-American artists such as Torres García; he develops a thinly labored structure, because it is embodied between what is said and what is not said, the non-place. The chromaticism of Armando Reverón blurs tones and colors, palettes and polychromy, landscapes and “surrealisms”, situations in-between. Artists from Latin America and their boldness anticipated the art “movements” from Europe and the United States.
“Brown is a term used by the Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (Brazilian Geography and Statistics Institute) to name one of the five groups of ‘color and race’ that compose the Brazilian population: white, black, yellow, and indigenous”. Brown is the color os mestizos. As if we weren’t all, in the world, of mixed races. Each one of us is many different ethnicities. I disagree with this “browning”. It is excluding. It negates ignited lives.
Edu takes on and paints brown-fleshes, investigates this place of added color among vigorous brown paints and materials.
Edu draws minimal lights among color contrasts, drawn lines and sculptural lines, on the edge, with different chromaticism approaches. Distances that are inter-penetrated, in unison. Edu doesn’t oppose, he encompasses, sustaining a luminous color that is realized and catches our attention. His paintings overflow, contaminate, vibrate.
Color, in Edu Silva’s work, exists in gerund: paintings that are happening!
Lucimar Bello. 07.02.2020
Tradução: Julia Lima
edu Silva: the mestizo archipelago
It is very important that, in these pictorial experiments about miscegenation, Edu Silva has abandoned any thematic or ideological mention: what matters ate the chromatic masses, large or small, deeply decorative, that come close together and fit into one another, showing the seams through contrasts or small threads and tiny stitchings, molecules that mark the transition from one to another. These stitches or interweaved knots are deeply valuable here, as gestures of embroidery that connects different things. We are now far away from the trivial, rushed and “modern” use of the term “hybrid”.
What is interesting is the conjunction (not what or who is with) as a mobile hinge that is in course and expanding, an incomplete and infinite metamorphosis of shapes and materials. This is a matter of educating the eyes to see “what binds pearls together”, as the African-Arabic poets and musicians sang. Plays between shape and light have been in the relations between culture and nature far before subjectivities.
Therefore, by abandoning the duality of oppositions, Edu give preference to the most varied and asymmetrical fields of relation and to the internal constructive processes (that are always composed of particles of many different things).
He thus gives continuity to the discontinuous. Painted collections/shapes, in a fabulously elaborate color range, are syntactically intersected through cuts and twisting and winding chamfers, as if they have been harvested from a telluric and tectonic magma in the rhythm of re-accommodating seismic quakes. Painting, sculpture, architecture in color dances.
Mixed shapes are in the earthy and rocky foundation of things. Hence the merges and sutures leaving the geological protrusions made of bumps and mounds always live and in sight, with their callous chafing exposing the interactions among the differences and paradoxes between large and small, tall and short, front and back, in and out: all these tasks for creating a panorama of ludic-mestizo and current-native knowledge outside of all domestications of official history, ancient or modern (whichever side the domestication comes from).
This is a celebration of embedded otherness. That which in the baroque movement is called the disparate list, due to the inclusion of unequal and abandoned repertoires, is translated by Edu Silva as the mestizo archipelago. But beware: it seems that new ravines, islands and reefs are always going to arise and recompose the landscape, neighborhoods, bodies, and life.
Amálio Pinheiro
Tradução: Julia Lima
Edu Silva and the Artistic Processes for Building Sensations
The artworks built by artist Edu Silva are the result of his research processes that stem from social and racial issues. Simultaneously, his compositions are projected and diluted into artistic manifestos, founded and structured on practices that resulted from his individual experiences with exclusive, innovative techniques that are updated by contemporary reality.
The works from the series Estudo sobre mestiçagem reverberate this combination of experience/reference/construction. These associations become evident from the abstract composition in color fields constructed with acrylic paint on canvas. Irregular monochromatic areas alternately challenge shaded spaces, in which the cartography that results from these tensioned borders strengthens and validates the artist’s convictions in the reality that reaches and surrounds him.
Thus, the controversies regarding the juxtaposition of layers forecast projective displacements between chaos and emptiness, among fissures and sensorial completeness, with edited frames in each work and in their original conception. Silva’s creative processes are anchored – but not limited to – his life in the suburbs of Embu das Artes, São Paulo, Brazil, and its inherent social class conflicts.
For Edu Silva, the representation of these subjects is part of his artistic research: cartographic raptures and the chromaticism of visual manifestos converge expressions of resistance and declare the artist’s desire to be part of a world without distinctions of color, race, gender and, especially, his respect towards diversity.
In the Autorretrato series, the chromatic format is diluted in the literal relation between segregation and miscigenation, in the artist’s experience with the other.
This manifestation becomes evident in the three-dimensional markings in the diagonal lines that delineate without direction the irregular structured pictorial layers. While simultaneously suggesting signs of breaking away from topographic landscape views, he also transgresses his artistic production as a catalyst for construction processes and discussions around contemporary aesthetics.
These works were exhibited for the first time in the collective show “Pintura Expandida”, held at Galeria Virgílio in 2018. The curatorial essay indicated that the projection and transgression of these compositions derived from heavily authorial processual interstices: that feeling which, according to philosopher Gilles Deleuze, is in the body, not in the air.
the feeling is what is painted. What is painted on the picture is the body, not as what is represented, but as something lived as experimenting certain sensations1.
The addition and balance in the same dimension of bodies are euphemistically inserted into these spaces, in tensioned intervals - the contemporary artistic agents. Thus, the artist’s desire to capture and project forces, not to reproduce or invent shapes, is revealed, becoming visible in the essence of Paul Klee.
Andrés I. M. Hernández
Curator and professor. São Paulo, summer 2018
1 See DELEUZE, Gilles. Francis Bacon: Lógica da sensação. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Jorge Zahar, 2007
Tradução: Julia Lima
About difficult things
Developing an artistic work doesn’t come instantly or linearly. If we look at this process as thoughts that systematized individually by the artist, gaining material or immaterial form, we may have a better understanding of the artwork. Some artists, working in various mediums, make their work more complex or “difficult” though apparently incomprehensible or less assimilable aspects and characteristics. There are two ways to perceive this issue: on one hand, this “difficulty” could be a strategy with different implications; on the other, it is less an option and more of a necessity – the artist may be searching for something but not know what it is yet.
Edu Silva’s recent paintings are difficult, especially if compared to his previous series, in which the representation of collective spaces (the neighborhood, houses) was somewhat figurative, with a graphic feel that reminds us of graffiti. Evidently, this made his pieces more accessible, “easier” to understand. Nonetheless, as stated before, taking a more difficult route wan’t an option, but a necessary consequence of the immaterial textile on which he mixed his paints: the fabric of social reality itself and the spaces in which this reality is organized and realized. What validates his quest is the honesty with which he paints – even though this doesn’t guarantee him anything, especially 1in a time when the word honesty is so worn out. These immaterial, or non-formal, aspects could have been more easily assimilated had his work succumbed to a pamphleteering stand that is so commonly seen nowadays. But Edu Silva chose a different path.
The combination os the immaterial elements and formal aspects that the artist articulates aesthetically is anchored in modern art – however, it is an extremely contemporary game between materiality and immateriality. It is not about what’s in, but about a restlessness regarding our time. This “game”, or negotiation, takes place in different simultaneous stages: space is the foundation for the other two “teams” that play in opposite fields. On one side, the material space of the canvas; on the other, the real urban space of the suburbs transformed into an immaterial dimension through his subjective perspective and its resulting constructive abstraction. Most of his canvases are square-shaped, as if a regular frame could have the ability to equalize the tensions that occupy it. It is almost as if the peripheries contained in distant chunks of color appeased social tensions. I feel that a lot of the tightness in these works comes from the artist’s self-imposed need to contain the paint in the square.
Once we established the field where these forces act, the next stage is comprised by colors. Here, Edu Silva will treat racial and segregation issues that afflict him in an unusual manner, in which thinking about consists of a surprising natural intellectual formulation (and thus so fortunate in its execution). By naming this series Estudos sobre Mestiçagem (Studies about miscegenation), he reveals the central point of his research, but doesn’t rely on it in a pamphleteering way. He breaks away from the usual or simpler route of using a “human” palette (in the artist’s own words) to create obvious representations of this theme. 2
Edu is free to develop a color scheme that strives for complex harmonies through a spatial organization that plays with predominant colors, usually in two shades, which cover a large area of the canvas – and, in some of his pieces, the edges are “stained”. Between these color fields arise clefts and gaps in different colors that emerge and become visible emphasizing the smaller areas. These beautiful and conflicting hues coexist, their interactions are toughly negotiated along the borders and fissures, as if they forced the mesh of a cohesive fabric that is, in fact, threadbare, covering like a rug that which shall not be exposed. Any similarity with our society is not a mere coincidence.
The combination of art and politics has always been harmful for the former. By charging art with a function, it is usually reduced, or it loses its power exactly where it was needed most. As the saying goes, art reaches a goal it didn’t have. Defining an objective, a function, is different from 3 having something to produce art with and about. Thus come, for artists like Edu Silva, the uncertainties and anxieties regarding a production that is in constant conflict between making and communicating something. I believe that the series Estudos Sobre Mestiçagem also draws its potency from a need for beauty that Edu persistently seeks. Not the pasteurized or common sense beauty, but the kind of beauty that is disturbing, that makes us think, above all, that makes us calmly look at things and question if there are other possibilities in the coexistence of differences in a common space, provided there is a sincere revelation of what is hidden or concealed. However, let us not be mistaken: this is not an easy task.
There is a tale in which a philosopher and a priest talked about what beauty was. Their debate lengthened, and the philosopher skillfully demonstrated that beauty could take up many forms, to which the priest replied that it was impossible, for beauty resided in elevated things that were a consensus among most people. Politely, the philosopher showed the priest that he could be mistaken about where beauty resided, but only if we were capable of moving past the doxa (opinion), expanding our understanding through questions, and concluding the conversation with the sentence:
“Beauty is a difficult thing” . 4
Marcelo Salles
1 Reference to Clement Greenberg in “Crônica de arte”, page 179, Cosac & Naify.
2 Recently, artist Adriana Varejão presented a series of paintings (Polvo Portraits) in which she developed a color palette 2 of “Brazilian skin tones”. Despite being conceptually flawless, the result is quite embarassing.
3 This phrase is attributed to Benjamin Constant; in a citation by Jean Philippe Domecq in “Uma Nova Introdução à Arte 3 do Século XX”.
4 Hippias Major, platonic conversation between Socrates and Hippias Major
Tradução: Julia Lima