Carlos Silva

Carlos Silva’s abstract works are strongly influenced by geometric spaces. Sometimes his installations interact with their immediate spatial surroundings. While geometry and classical rules of pictorial composition serve as a framework, the actual ductus is left to the interplay of chance and the control of the brush, similar to calligraphy. In addition, colour and plasticity and the subtle nuances that result play a central role in the impact of each individual work. Carlos works mainly with ink and acrylic on paper.


Carlos Silva

---

Serial Experiments


The starting point of my art is to create a dialogue between image and viewer in a multi-sensory space. Through my studies and practice as an architect in Bogota, Colombia, and my later turn to painting, I developed the idea of an image in an abstract as well as concrete space, which is determined by arrangements of objects that are both friends and rivals. The urban space of Berlin, where I have lived since 1999, allows me to observe the overlapping of surfaces and lines, the chaotic yet orderly juxtaposition and interplay of nature, people, road traffic and architecture. The finding and dissolving of bodies, the organic and aimless growth and sinking, the anonymous and individual is transformed into the dynamics of the application of paint with brush and palette knife, the modulation of colour and layers of paint, the individualisation of form in the structure of my arrangements, in an ongoing serial experiment.

The semantics of my pictorial elements allow the materiality of my means – colour, painting surface and my tools – to become actors in a sensual world of expression. The work of art takes precedence over theory. Its sensuality takes precedence over content. My painting is directed at the human body’s eye, at a non-representational but ordered sensation of colour and form. Building up this order and interrupting it at the same time, allowing control and chance of the tool, layering areas of colour, superimposing them and letting them shine through: This opens up a discursive, visual poetry that unfolds infinitely in space and time. Here, a floating stepping forwards and sinking into the depths are created, a ‘place where our brain and the universe meet’, as Paul Klee wrote.

Ulrike Pennewitz