Jerald Silva: Through Another Looking Glass
Jerald Silva: Through Another Looking Glass
The artist’s world, expressed through their medium, evokes a feeling to affect its viewer, and when successful, has potential to immerse them in a fresh, new perspective. Artspace 1616’s current show, Jerald Silva: Through Another Looking Glass, is a retrospective of success, and hauntingly so. The world Silva creates follows you and will imprint your mind with his rendition of reality. After seeing the extensive repertoire in Through Another Looking Glass, you may question the boundaries of the blasé, but you will not question the captivating technique and depth of works by Jerald Silva.
Landscapes, figures and still life are the subject matter of choice from 1971 to present. The show totals in at 43 artworks, and if one more work was displayed it would be overload, but it is a complete tour de force. It is refreshing, even uplifting to interact with Silva’s paintings in watercolor which soften the focus of reality, not as an escape, but rather, a new way of seeing. The expansive space of the gallery provides a container to explore and converse over the everyday, sometimes mundane, and totally fresh take on these common subjects.
Silva’s medium of choice is watercolor, though he would not consider himself a watercolorist. His application of this nuanced medium is what imbues his subject with innovative perspective. Silva’s large format paintings are sized on Lenox paper, and his unique process of layering the watercolor atop glue on the paper, allows for manipulation of the painted surface without the typical saturation that comes with watercolor territory. The liberty he wields with watercolor yields a new experience to viewers, inviting them to lean in, take time to gaze upon the surface, get intimate with the content of life as art.
The exhibit begins with a stylized series Silva calls “steamy windows[1].” This quality is shown in works throughout the 1990’s and one can see how this evolves into his other series, Room with a View. Both series layer a background image with a foreground image that alludes to something one could draw with one’s finger. This psychically tactile quality sparks the senses to spar with the image and the imagination. In Steamy Window at Arden Way (1997), the gloomy scene is illuminated by the reflective glow of streetlights, and the viewer peers through the fog of what is likely a car window. Playfully, Silva introduces us to his illusionistic watercolor method by layering imagery that appears like something childlike one would draw on fogged glass. The stately painting of Steamy Window - Degas Horses (1999) utilizes negative and positive space with this defined visual element to reference the jockey and steed forms of Edgar Degas’ 1883 depiction of Before the Take off. In the Room with a View series, Silva employs this same layered phantom image technique. In Room with a View: Susan’s Crabapple Tree (2018), a vibrant landscape of pink blooms in luscious greenery are framed by the implied window with still life scene. This transparent world atop the “real” one is both whimsical and mysterious.
Few earlier works in the exhibit from the 1970’s display the incipience of Silva’s use of watercolor. John Thompson (1975) and Girly Still Life (1980) both are used without his signature application, but they do present the show’s narrative turn from the landscape subject matter, and towards a more intimate nature with figures and interiors. Curatorially, the private hallway of the gallery creates conversation and context between the works. Gallery design can manipulate the way works are perceived, and in this case, especially, it is done with finesse. As if in the corridor of a home, each work is like peering into a room. At one end of the hallway is In My Room (2020) and dynamically hung at the other end is In My Room – 2 (2018). Both scenes have a quality of solitude with a picturesque interior and a glimpse of the artist’s visage.
The human form makes its appearance in a number of the remainder of works. Posed and unposed, real in repose – the figure is rendered in Silva’s method of softness. There is a voyeuristic quality in the way he presents models in uncanny humanness. As in Two Models and Their Mother (1994), a studio modeling session is taking place while an older, mother figure tenderly runs her fingers through one model’s hair, and the third figure lies down with arms over her face. All figures seem caught in a moment in time, and this same captured quality is present in Two More Models (1995), except in the latter, the arranged figures are staring at the viewer. Similarly, in Reclining Mary (2005), the figure gazes at the viewer and is surrounded by vases, paintings, drapery, light and shadow. It is as if the model has become a still life herself.
The show’s namesake, Through Another Looking Glass (2016), has a colorfully adorned figure frontal facing and gazing directly at the viewer. This work, in particular, is laden with meticulous detail and the scene, in totality, showcases Silva’s technical craft. Clay Lady (1999) is another figure painting in watercolor, but it shows the unique manipulation of his material. In the likeness of the title, the figure appears to have sculptural texture and is set in a darker tone of color with a heaviness that adds to the impact of the image.
In the enclosed room, a range of works are shown. Sky of Ashes (2020) is particularly ominous, with current wildfire events, and Me with Me (2020) shows the shadow of the artist upon the land. The shadow is a layer of the landscape, just as the images from Room with a View and Steamy Window contain imprints of the world created by the artist.
The final niche of the gallery space for the exhibit displays intimate portraits in Checking my Teeth (1987) and Sue Blotting Lipstick (1987). In the images, Silva depicts the female figure in the act of removing excess lipstick, and himself with mouth and eyes wide. They are both shown from three different angles, as if the surface is a mirror. But isn’t it? The canvas, the paper, the film is always a mirror. These details of life are, as Peter Frank, L.A. Weekly art critic wrote in 1995, “ …shaped by the impulses and projections of a control freak, a voyeur, a narcissist, a mild paranoiac – that is to say, it is shaped by neuroses common to us all.”[2]
With works spanning forty years of critical success, Jerald Silva: Through Another Looking Glass, is a show to attend with curiosity. Silva’s paintings in watercolor are relatable and mutable, infusing his crafted reality with a mood that captivates its viewer. As a Sacramento native, Jerald Silva presents regional and nonlocal representation in an effective and alluring manner, and, like an alchemist, transmutes his medium to convey meaning for the viewer experiencing and interacting with life as it is, real and imagined.
Brittni Plavala
November 4, 2020
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