Unresolved
Silvia Poloto: The Unresolved Series - Text by Terri Cohn
Although no one quite remembers who first said, "a picture is worth more than a thousand words," its potential implications and meanings remain timeless. A painting is a window into another world. It is inherently a narrative medium that tells stories or compels us to construct them from the relationships created by its composed images, colors, lines, gestures and space. Over the past half-century, the anecdotal potential of painting has been expanded by its material juxtaposition with photographic images, which has encouraged both interchange and non-linear relationships between the two media. The possibility for unabashed associative relationships among pictorial elements is indebted to the early explorations of Robert Rauschenberg, the Pop artists, and the media explosion of the mid-twentieth century, all of which opened vast potential for artistic invention and interpretation.
Silvia Poloto, a painter and mixed media artist, is heir to this rich tradition. An inventive and prolific artist, she has played with the expansive connotative dynamic between painting and photographic images in her recent series Unresolved. In this series of fifteen works, Poloto has expanded on her earlier abstract paintings and has retained a consistent palette dominated by primary, neutral, and orange tones. However, in these new works, she has introduced iconic images that allude to the complex range of human emotions. Poloto's methodology and the often sinister tenor of the series was established with the first piece, titled Lies, which features an archival pigment print of a worn wooden doll partially shrouded in satin fabric. The contrast between the brilliantly lit, impassive toy resting in a suggestive interior, and the spectral, Pinocchio-like shape beside it, evokes a sense of foreboding childhood tales and memories.
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. Some works have more ominous implications, like Exit, with its centrally placed image of a syringe, and Betrayal, where the tip of a knife appears to pierce the center of the blood-red canvas. Other paintings, such as Penance, which is dominated by a medieval mace, and Worship, which features a beatific black Madonna that belonged to Poloto's grandmother, refer to the influence of her Brazilian-Catholic upbringing. By contrast Couture is quite free and playful, with its images of a button and a spool of thread interconnected by a fiber that loops from one to the other across the painterly diptych canvas.
With a desire to create works that retain an edge yet embody a greater sense of levity, Poloto painted two pieces that speak of love and marriage: Promises, which is populated by two elegantly dressed men, and Vows, a pair of bridal gowned women. While these paintings continue the artist's investigation of relationships, she has since created a more emblematic series where she has used pigs as human surrogates. Oddly enough, the implied predicaments of the small photographic images of plastic swine that populate Commitment, Community, Reverence, and Isolation are even more disturbing than their human counterparts in Poloto's other works, perhaps because the contrast between their inherent innocence, the situations they represent, and our implied treatment of them is so painfully apparent. As is characteristic of Poloto's oeuvre, it may be her candor about such tacit circumstances that evokes our own unresolved feelings about the truth of the human condition.
Terri Cohn is a San Francisco based writer, curator and art historian.
Unresolved series Reviewed by Deborah Phillips
Brazilian-born Silvia Poloto is an accomplished artist working in a range of visual disciplines. Based in San Francisco, she is known for her lively abstract canvases and mixed-media sculptures. While the Bay Area is her current home, Poloto continues to exhibit widely in the U.S., Europe, Brazil and Middle East ( Dubai and Jordan).
Recognized for her dynamic compositions and color sensibility, Poloto exploits a vibrant visual vocabulary of boldness and subtlety. Her deftly handled juxtapositions unfold in rich, textured hues and expressive gesture. The result is a body of work characterized by equal amounts of surprise, playfulness and provocation. Her aesthetic choices engage the viewer on a visceral level.
Increasingly, Poloto finds herself incorporating full-blown figurative imagery into the framework of her abstract compositions. Making the leap to representation, Poloto embraces form and symbolism, endowing her work with unexpected meaning and context. The spontaneous word play and flourishes of calligraphy in earlier paintings now give way to unfettered narrative opportunity and interpretation.
The series, Unresolved, melds abstraction and image to surreal effect. Superimposing large-scale images of recognizable objects into the paintings provides fertile ground for storytelling. The work takes on intended and subconscious meanings, from the personal to the political. Each painting challenges and delights with their mix of emotion and humor.
It was three years ago in Brazil that Poloto had a middle-of-the-night revelation that would ultimately change the way she works. It wasn’t until just this year, however, that she found a way to make the shift to imagery as defining characteristic of her work.
A tattered baby doll belonging to a friend, became the touchstone for change. At once vulnerable and repellent, the doll’s image took hold of the artist’s imagination. Incorporating painting, photography and digital technology, the first painting in the series opened up a gold mine of symbolic content. Thematic threads from one painting to another, creates a lively dialogue between the individual works.
A signal idea informs each painting. In Lies, Poloto pairs the doll with a Pinocchio puppet. In the finished work, Pinocchio appears as an encroaching shadow, looming toward the doll. Is her innocence in peril? Or, is she safe in his shadow? Benign and menacing overtones leave the viewer in suspense.
In Unspoken for example, a fish out of water finds himself silenced by means of a metal vise clamped onto his mouth. Centered in the stillness of the painting, the naturally silent creature is an ironic target for a free-speech crackdown. Held hostage, his gentle demeanor assumes the dimension of martyrdom.
Worship refers to the famous Black Madonna -- a powerful figure among South America’s faithful. As a child, Poloto found her grandmother ‘s fervor for the saint unnerving. Worship brings the uninitiated artist closer to the surrendering properties of faith. Enshrined in uncertain shadows of smoky grays and deep blacks, the Madonna shines forth as a magical presence imbued with life affirming accents of cerulean blue and bright red.
An instrument of torture points the way to PenanceinPoloto’s compressed composition.Density of form and color suggests dank dungeons and secret passageways. A spiked ball-and-chain of medieval manufacture still leaves plenty of room for the pain and the pleasure of self-flagellation and atonement.
Two paintings address the ramifications of love in the 21st century. Plastic figurines blown up to represent a pair of brides and grooms in separate paintings titled Vowsand Promises. Poloto’s nod to gay marriage contemplates larger themes of universal love and intimacy. Huddled together at their respective altars, these same-sex couples, with their backs to the viewer, seek legitimacy in an uncertain world.
The over-scaled spool of thread and button in Couture is a fanciful response to high fashion. The artist cleverly ensconces these lowly tools of couture in a diptych that exalts the utility of these humble sewing necessities.
Cold hard cash comes up against deep, warm, crimson tones in the painting, Power. Squeezed into the red, this bankroll of U.S. currency wields its power for good and for ill. The life-blood of prosperity has its shadow life in the searing red tones of Poloto’s canvas. She reminds us that money may equal power, but at what price?
In Seduction, a photo-perfect tube of red lipstick stands front and center against a background of bright colors. The siren call of its treacherous allure cannot be ignored. Reminiscent of sixties-style Pop, Poloto’s lipstick comes with a steep price. It is seduction on a global level – from rampant greed to material obsolescence.
A compilation of disparate abstract elements coalesces into an invincible barrier in Betrayal. Solid forms and fence-like elements are meant to repel the enemy, but they cannot ward off a large butcher blade that stabs the canvas, literally, in the back. Violence to the blood stained painting alludes to all manner of treachery.
Conflict is a timely topic. Within a window-like frame, the artist has inserted a toy soldier to defend the painting’s internal landscape. In his tireless stance of preparedness, he stands ready to take on the enemy day after day without complaint or cynicism. The harsh reality of war need not impinge on his idealistic presence.
Unlike the toy soldier in Conflict, the stolid silver spaceman of Quest journeys far beyond the realm of war-torn lands. Bygone heroes of early space exploration are remembered, but this space pioneer is on a spiritual quest for meaning in the universe. His journey transcends the personal in hopes of discovering cosmic truths.
A large rimmed wheel with metal spokes symbolically points to destiny and fortune in the painting, Fate. Crystal gazing poses unseen consequences as Poloto’s wheel takes a spin into the future. Is it really fate or just wishful thinking?
Exit, signified by a syringe that slashes diagonally across the painting’s red-hot interior, poses an uncomfortable dilemma: A syringe may save a life or take one away. It is associated with drug use and the deadly diseases of HIV and AIDS. One can make a clean exit or not. Poloto’s oversized syringe carries the weight of the world in its balancing act as the central image of a painting that considers the morbidity of no exit.
Deborah Phillips, a longtime editor and reviewer of the visual arts, is currently based in San Francisco.