Absence / Presence
Silvia Poloto at 415 Gallery - Text by Dewitt Cheng, May 2008
Gallery 415 is pleased to present recent work by the Brazilian-born San Francisco painter, photographer, and mixed-media artist Silvia Poloto. A prolific artist who has shown in an impressive list of venues during her career, she will be showing not only the lyrical abstractions on canvas for which she is best known, but also a series of recent multimedia works on wood entitled Absence/Presence; these pieces combine painting with digital imagery, both found and manufactured, in order to reflect on the psychology of illness and mortality. While the new works take on the serious themes of classical art, they retain Poloto’s masterly command of color, gesture and texture; they are sumptuously beautiful improvisations that have come together from the disparate elements filling the artist’s studio through the agency of Poloto’s intuition — her perfect visual pitch.
The mixed-media Observations paintings are brilliantly colored but modulated fields of acrylic paint inhabited by an assortment of visual events: sweeping brushstrokes in black and white, meandering lines, grids of dots, poured squiggles, and scrubbed-in blobs. They are reminiscent of various Abstract Expressionist painters —Miro, Baziotes, Rothko, Motherwell, and Tapies— but this is a synthesis that creates its own world. A variety of marks is presented close up to the picture plane in front of an aqueous, shadowy mass of color, as if floating on waves or emerged from chaos, but drifting slightly; a sense of temporality and change emerges from the sometimes odd and ambiguous shapes, which seem to breathe.
The new Absence/Presence mixed-media works on wood with resin combine Poloto’s painting with the digital work of her two recent conceptual series: Crush, matching allegorical titles (Lust, Discord, Crave, Release) with enlarged photographs of details of common (but unidentified) household objects; and her Unresolved series of color photos based on dolls and props, with their religious-themed tableaus (Power, Penance, Worship, Lies). The new works, generally door-sized, hint at transcendence and transformation, combining the beauty of her painterly color and gesture with the submerged emotional content of the photographic work to suggest an infinite or mystical vision revealing the eternal and the temporal as interpenetrating and complementary. Art critic Terri Cohn writes: “Poloto consistently savors the play between the power of the photographic images she uses, the gestural, abstract ground she paints around them, and the gridded compositional format that holds the two in dialogue with each other.” For the artist, objects and field, figure and ground are equivalent — merely different states of matter.
Robert Rauschenberg famously said that he wanted to work in the gap between art and life, and many contemporary artists followed his lead — not just in incorporating a miscellany of objects and media in their work, but also demystifying the artistic process from romantic inspiration to open-ended experimentation. Such an esthetic demands not just a fearless openness to stimuli and ideas, but also the visual imagination and instincts to refine the daily chaos into an ordered esthetic beauty. Poloto, who immigrated to California in 1992 as a young electrical engineer and discovered her knack for visual communication almost by chance, possesses both qualities in abundance. Pursuing her art education independently, she picked up metalworking, painting, video and photographic skills as she needed them —“Nothing could stop me,” she says. She remembers somewhat wryly, however, that after welding metal sculptures out of creative compulsion, she discovered a book on Abstract Expressionist sculptor David Smith, and in it, her unknown artistic ancestors.
That slight reinvention of the wheel aside, however, Poloto’s career has been extremely successful. Her sculpture, paintings and assemblages that have been exhibited in France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Egypt, Greece, Bulgaria, Jordan, Romania, China, and the United Arab Emirates as well as the United States in Dallas, Portland, Chicago, Park City, Los Angeles, Seattle, Miami, New York City and, of course, San Francisco. Bay Area venues displaying her work include the DeYoung Museum, where she was an artist in residence, the Italian-American Museum, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Her work resides in eighty corporate collections and more than nine hundred private collections. She has won many prizes and awards and has been featured in many publications. This is her first exhibition with Gallery 415.
Dewitt Cheng is an artist, curator and contributing writer to Artweek, Art Ltd and East Bay Express.
Silvia Poloto – Absence/Presence By Terri Cohn
One of Silvia Poloto’s great artistic strengths is her ability to create liaisons between her pleasure in paint and the desire to express deeply meaningful, personal content. The mixed media paintings in her new series Absence/Presence are abstract expressions of emotional content rather than literal descriptions, associational, sensitively composed, and suggestive of memory. They invite us in to wander, consider, and determine meaning for ourselves.
Poloto tends to use a lexicon of symbolic imagery that we naturally want to piece together to determine content. While she engages the viewer through her skillful play with color, shape, and composition, the works in this series are also populated with such consistent elements as bugs, thorn studded branches, red balls, and twisting lines, seemingly emblematic of her husband’s illness. Both Essence and Wonder are comprised of individual areas that contain these expressions of her visual vocabulary, almost like a glossary of conditions and emotions. Some of the paintings—Whisper, Essence--have screened-back areas that suggest memory and landscape. The most specific is Embrace, populated by elements like pills, staples, and hair, implying the artist’s acceptance of her current life circumstances. By contrast, Solace is quieter, with its suggestion of a diamond-floored hallway that opens in to a space of golden light.
Primarily structured as vertical compositions, some of these works—Ebb, Whisper, Void--are structurally suggestive of beds. Poloto has created this objectness, in part, by arranging her compositions so that many elements rest in foreground space. Her evocation of beds is replete with allusions to rest, comfort, and warmth, as well as to sleep and dreaming, sex and pain. The bed as an archetype--described in Adrienne Rich’s poem Rauschenberg’s Bed--is also mute, unable to articulate what it has witnessed, although by its existence bears evidence of those events. In a related way, Poloto’s associational canvases merge art’s continual conundrums: abstraction and representation, mood and narrative, materiality and subjectivity, order and chaos: the aesthetic awareness of our tenuous existence and shared ordinariness.
Terri Cohn is a writer, curator, and art historian, and contributing editor to Artweek magazine.. She is a faculty member and Graduate Faculty Advisor at the San Francisco Art Institute, and serves as a trustee for the Djerassi Resident Artist Program.
Artist’s Statement : Absence – Presence
Until November 2007 my husband Billy had lived a very healthy life. Then, out of the blue, early on a Saturday morning, he became ill and within hours underwent emergency surgery to remove a malignant brain tumor. Then, a week later my father passed away in Brazil.
Throughout the subsequent period of grieving, radiation treatments, chemo sessions, bouts of despair, and moments of pure joy I created the works for this exhibition. I call the series Absence - Presence.
The mask displayed here is the one Billy used during his six weeks of radiation therapy. Its expressive power inspired me on so many levels, that I decided to show it along with the works it helped to provoke.
The idea for this body of work came to me as a way of dealing with the enormity of emotions - the loss, sorrow, fear, pain, and despair - flowing over and in me. By drawing my heartbreak, I could slowly accept what was happening. Through acceptance, I have been able to be at peace in the present moment and begin to find happiness once again.
I have learned that feeling good is my choice. I can't depend on life's circumstances to make me happy or be at peace. Change is its own master. I have no control over how, when, or why things change. But, I can reach within myself and find peace and happiness no matter what is going on, good or bad, to me and the people I most love.
This work started as charcoal drawings on paper, representing my emotional states. Next I made a series of assemblages. For these three-dimensional compositions, in addition to the drawings, I used plexiglas boxes, resin, and different found objects such as rubber flies, nails, thread, red balls, hair, pills, staples, cotton balls, and gauze.
Once the assemblages were complete, I photographed them. As a way to make what I saw to be ugly, beautiful, I combined the photographs with abstract paintings, and had them printed on canvas. Finally, I mounted the canvases on wood panels and poured resin over them.
I call these pieces Void, Whisper, Flow, Ebb, Solace, Essence, Wonder and Embrace.
Silvia Poloto, San Francisco - June, 2008