Inés Silva is a young artist of a distinguished expositive trajectory in Venezuela and abroad. Since her beginnings, Inés placed her work within the currents of abstract geometric constructivism, in which she continues to work while exploring, in a permanent manner, new creative possibilities, whether in formal aspects or technical, operative, speculative, materials and every other aspect.
Several years ago, Inés actively joined the art movement Madi, in Venezuela, and later on joined it internationally. The Madi movement, of Argentinean, Uruguayan and Venezuelan origin, and thereinafter European, is perhaps, the most long-lived art movement among the historic vanguards of the Second World Postwar period. Since then, Madi continues to be actively present and vital, spreading itself globally, always finding diverse ways of diversity to renew and reformulate itself.
At the present time, Inés Silva is one of the international promoters and activists of Madi art, and is also of one of the current derivations of Madi, which is not exactly a deriva-
other variables are added, such as the distance of a glance, or its traveling speed, light intensity or changes generated by the manipulation of parts of the work. Each of these resultant images depend on variations operated from the place where the work is looked at. All this correspond to material, physical, practical, substantial, quantifiable, measurable, classifiable and weighable factors that intervene in the circumstances and deciding conditions at that instant in which the work is looked at
Another additional infinity of variables that take place in the visual observation of the work is the one that corresponds to the psychic, the spirit, which is contrary to the nature of the concrete physic materiality of the variations we just mentioned. These mental and emotional variables are essentially subjective, personal, intimate, unique, and result indeterminable, imponderable, intangible, due to their immaterial, affective, irrational, and singular nature. In this regard, the perception of Inés Silva’s works is modified as the material appearances of these works change, and also because they depend on the mood or the psychic conditions of the individual that looks at them.
We refer to other factors affecting the perception and the way to understand art works, such as historical, social, cultural, ideological, religious and mythical contexts, and also artistic (or inter-artistic) contexts, because they operate in a different manner, they are not that immediate and direct than the previous ones, and because their extreme complexity would be too extensive for a short representation of an exposition.
With regard to material and psychic variables, capable of modifying the perception of interactive art works, it is important to mention that in the case of Inés Silva, she is qualified to handle both factors in a proper fashion given her aptitudes, sensibility and education, and the fact that she has been doing it in a successful manner. She combines sensibility and intelligence, and such combination allows her to handle herself in a gracious manner when dealing with the issues we have addressed, related to transformable and participative arts.
Given her professional background as an architect, and her experience as plastic artist, Inés Silva is intellectually qualified to combine in her works, rational intellectual components with sensitive ones, in which reason prevails, but without letting aside the most discreet
tion but a related and autonomous tendency, an independent trend of unlimited innovative possibilities. We are referring now to the art that Inés Silva exposes and cultivates. It is about the movement that in the first manifest of its launching in Caracas, Omar Carreño called «Expansionism». Later on, there were other circumstantial names attached to the movement, but it is still defined as an interactive art, which allows, requires, or promotes the active participation of the spectator, who no longer is a passive receptor of the art work, but becomes a creator, or at least a final co-creator, by intervening and modifying the work’s physical appearance. This is what Inés Silva is doing in Venezuela, and at times abroad. However, what she does not do, is participate or intervene in other artists’ works; she engages herself in the creation of her own works and arrange them in such manner so that spectators are encouraged to manipulate and modify them to their liking or just to vary them.
These works, given their peculiar and distinctive characteristics, are usually described as interactive, or participative, transformable, manipulable, etc., or are called by the name coined by Omar Carreño: «expansionist», with no relation to any international political expansionism attributable or not to Venezuela. The only meaning of the «expansionism» term herein referred is the one conveyed by Carreño in his manifests.
Inés Silva’s current sculptures, reliefs and mobiles define themselves by the fact of being convertible, or manipulable, and the same happens with so many other works sharing the same premises and precepts of the plastic movement that gathers all of them. Inés Silva’s works have a personal and different way to be modified and carefully worked out, without losing harmony, rhythm, order, or the dynamics which keep them united and give them meaning, even if every change seems to revive and revitalize them in a different manner.
For several years, one of the constant factors in the artist’s works has been, and continues to be, the use of transparent plastic materials (acrylic), as support of her works. Over this material the artist paints plans, stripes or lines in intense and translucent colors. By doing so, her works get to contain an infinitive number of points of view that allow for their entire appreciation from any given perspective. To each one of these innumerable vision angles,
and fine presence of affectivity. In this regard, it could be said that the theoretical and aesthetic foundation of Inés Silva’s artistic production remains anchored in Modernity, although it does not reject Post Modernity influences, mostly concerning the subject weakening and the undefined openings to diversity, by virtue of interactive effects.
For now, and for the artist, the need to attract and fascinate, typical of art, are covered by the sensitive and affective (and maybe add the imaginative) factor. And the need to convince, demonstrate and make understand the work or the reality that correspond to the scientific and technical knowledge, are determined by Inés’ systematic and academic education in architecture.
Thus, the scientific and artistic discourses which have always been considered as diametrically opposed, as antipodes, and also as incompatible, especially during two centuries and a half of the Modern period, are now reconciled in the creative praxis of Inés Silva, in which they communicate and support each other, and somehow exchange operating modes, getting closer to the paradigms of Post Modernity. We have now distanced ourselves (maybe not in Venezuela) from the dogmatic and rigid times of Galileo, who had to use anamnesis in order to conceal the disruptive nature of his innovations and gain acceptance.
Perhaps,the most significant and transcendental problem set out in the creation process, or the conception of Inés Silva’s works, that is, her «ars poetica», consists in designing in her works, a formal device as a group of signals, marks, lines, gaps, proportions, mobile sheets, capable of organizing itself in a harmonic manner, and make intelligible and sensitively emotional, the group of dynamic situations and perceptive tensions that integrate themselves or that take place in that visual event that constitutes the work. And all that is displayed in accordance with, or in tune with, the invisible tensions of the space around the work, that is, the environmental space of the architecture in which the work is finds itself. This way the plastic work shall brightens up or livens up the space that surrounds it. Also, this phenomenon, this type of artistic communication, or communion, gets to be highly sensitive, eloquent and emotional.
The semiotic keys of these works and the hermeneutic knot of the All translations by Alejandra Nardelli and César Mendoza
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problem sets out by the artist are included in this process. In short, although and maybe more confusing, the «ars» consists of the appropriate use of multiple tensions the really or potentially govern the dynamics of the interior and exterior space of the work, which is only a single space. In other words: the work aims at the unification and harmonic handling of the potential tensions of a given space, offered to the perception of the spectator in the most possible synthetic and eloquent form
It is worth mentioning that the unity of the perception of reality (and space), and the clarity of its representation have always been essential and universal worries in arts. Until Post Modernity, artists tried to organize the world (to reality) and organize their feelings through arts. Everything had to be organized and subjected to the control of the spirit. Nothing could be at random.
Einstein, captivated by the symmetry kingdom (and the old symmetries and harmonies of Pythagorean times) attempted to decipher the unity of universe forces and described it as a probable manifestation of the original energy of God.
From the idea of universal predominance of the reason, emerging from the idea of God, derived in the Modern time the need for a general control of the artistic event, from which the ambition to control everything was created, typical of the totalitarian power, as we all know it, searching for solutions like that of the «panopticom vision» described by Foucault, focused on an all seeing eye, watching and controlling everything, as the God’s eye, the essential organ of domination.
A crucial moment which gave art a leading role in the history of unitary and centralist ideas of representations, was the celebration of Council of Trent, which decreed and unleashed the sacred and semiological «Efficacy of Signs», which gave a colossal impulse to the creation of arts, from which the Baroque period was born. This enormous stimulus of arts consecrated the exploitation of art, the effects of which still remain and now rise among us.
We bring these reflections up since they constitute one of the main essential axiomatic of Inés Silva’s creative work, and also because of the disjunctive character, of controversial dilemma, which surrounds the bordering and defining problem of theoretical separation between
confirm our ties with the external reality and the interior inspiration. The use of geometry leads towards an emotional clarification of the space, which makes it sensible and rationally more intelligible. The visual matter and the rational qualities of the perception are received by the conscience in a more eloquent and more magnificent manner. Through this aesthetic use of geometry, that can cover macro and micro parts such as the objects of the inquisitive look, it is possible to obtain the exact synthesis of the ways of visual apprehension of reality. Thus, a form, that is rational and sensible at the same time, is achieved to access beauty in a simple and short way, but with a complex and profound depth.
Inés Silva’s works are not mere isolated and remote objects. They constitute, as it has already been described, an object device that allows us to communicate through dialogues with the space of which the works are part of, in a transformable, at times changeable and variable manner, besides of being arranged with the changing conditions of our visual reading, in which the projection and identification processes operate between the work and the observer. Thus, the work does not close it over itself, nor is it the cause and effect of its own creation. In some way, the work is processual because it works as a part of an open process that complies, in an undefined way, with the empathy of each look that makes it revive. The condition of undetermined opening of these works, of voluntary incompleteness, increases in cases in which its creation includes some important elements such as parts of the work that can (and must) be manipulated by the spectator, to whom the work offers, by means of hinges and others devices, the possibility to modify, transform, turn over, vary, invert, displace, make a spin over an axe, and operate other changes in the physical appearance of the work. These foreseeable and anticipated changes alter the essential content of theirs expressive discourse, that is, without altering their sense.
It is necessary to point out that the manipulation of the work by the spectator does not constitute the only interactive characteristic of Inés Silva’s works; even though it does constitutes, from the factual (physical and practice) point of view, the most immediate and notable factor, besides of being original. However, the interactivity is even more complex, richer and deeper, if we broadly consider it, within the
Modernity and Post Modernity, especially regarding the spacetemporary unit of universe, the subsequent structural and conceptual unit of art, the preservation of the Aristotelian unit and the cohesion among the elements composing the art work.
Inés Silva gives a priority interest to the exploration and use of qualities and properties of the space-time in which her works are developed, by trying to exploit the energies and tensions very typical of the spaces and areas connected to these works, such as: attractions and repulsions, tensions and relaxations, agitations and pauses, excitation and calm, expansion and contraction, agitation and relaxation, acceleration and curb, etc. For the artist, all these energies should be, in theory, unified in its totality. And even better if the oppositions, antagonisms and polarities, extremely necessary to liven up the works, can be reconciled and in harmony through the extreme use of the former harmony, which is not that of our own, trivialized and degraded, but the one that survived to the end of the «coincidentia opositorum». In any case, Postmodernism has made possible the former «unity of contraries». It can also reconcile and create harmony between the unifying drive of the exact sciences and the disorganized and disruptive passion of arts.
It is necessary to alert that a significant part of the problem of insurmountable contradictions in art does not consist in one of the poles imposing itself on the other aiming at its elimination (as the militarist mind would do it against those who adverse it); instead, it consists of ways to negotiate coexistence, variable or unequal, between both poles, that will end up by complementing and cooperating with each other.
In order to understand the interactive and mobile works of Inés Silva, previous knowledge of geometry, painting or architecture is not necessary. It is just sufficient to have an open sensitivity to what is «constructive», or some constructive talent (not attitude), in the literal and metaphorical sense of the term (as it is said when opposing the constructive criticism to the destructive negativity), given the fact that Inés Silva’s geometry is not just a knowledge and rationalization instrument, but also a way to connect us to the soul. On this path the reason and the aesthetic emotion converge in a balanced and fruitful relation. In this respect, the plastic proposals of the artist
variable and multiple inter-relation area that is established between the main implicit factors in the artist event of the work, such as: author, work, spectator, reality of the exterior world, collective imagination, as well as the relations between the historical, social, psychic, cultural, inter-artistic contexts of each one of the aforesaid main factors.
In order to arrive at the conclusion of these comments, let us refer to the most original and singular contribution of this exhibition, which is made up by two interdependent ideas that are reciprocally complemented creating a single proposition. Inés Silva, motivated by the excellent result of the museum graphic solution that she experimented in her individual exhibition at the Center of Beaux-Arts of Maracaibo, which consisted of a pictorial ingenious intervention of the hall where her works were exhibited, wanted to create in her exhibition, a very narrow and visual relation between the paintings and the floor, up in the plafond, the walls of the hall and the works distributed in that great space, in order to unify her works with the environment where they are, as if the design of the pieces would continue in the lines, in the painted forms of the hall. Thus the exhibition almost became a great installation where the works increased their presences and seemed to burst in the environment. The space of the place came to live and became the central part, while the works responded by expanding themselves with a centrifugal energy and an intensification of the forms.
Now, for this new exhibition, Inés Silva repeats her preceding successful museum graphic essay in this corrected and augmented new edition, as this coined phrase goes. In this exhibition, some kind of projected scheme or diagram will be added, which is inspired in the famous Piazza di Campidoglio of Michelangelo that has been used several times in urban designs of different cities around the world, including Caracas. Thus, Inés Silva’s exhibition will show a sort of splendorous museum graphic outfit, without being scenographic at all, in which her works, already beautiful by themselves, shall be ennobled by the geometric genius of the Piazza di Campidoglio.
Perán Erminy
English version published in the catalogue De Rerum Natura (2009).