The bonding between art and technology or art and science, has always been difficult to interpret.
For centuries, such bond progressively flourished in a history of ancient times.
The relative slowness with which technical innovations have influenced the order of geometric art, has always lead to easily recognize the artistic object within the historical context of its creation. Furthermore, a timely glance allows us to interpret and analyze the fractures and innovations that have taken place in contemporary geometric art. The debate on «legitimacy» of new instruments and technologies in the artistic sphere is revived by Inés Silva through a surprising identity of a commanding line of arguments: start from the concrete, observe, analyze, construct a hypothesis, experiment, verify, know how to create connections, take possession of available materials, technologies and information. This is the path towards the structure of the idea, the result of the idea —the construction of the idea.
The construction of the idea (shape) and the analysis of its possibilities of combination, leaves no doubt as to where the plastic research can lead us, which in its own right may be hypothetical or necessarily methodological, in the search for even more complex new combinations, that reveal themselves as an «intellectual expression» which we understand as a projection, elaboration, and construction of an essential and flawless scheme based on the variants of reiterated geometric elements, inexorably modified by their immersion in classical archetypes of spatial proportions as a genuine formula, not only for the measuring of the space, but also as a synergic juncture where geometry and human versus idea and poetry, merge on to and become complementary.
The work, its fruition, should it be formulated in conditions of communicative integration, which allows for exchanges to take place among its constitutive elements and information flows originating from its surroundings, leads to the definition of the work no longer for the work itself given its structure and internal norms, but as a plausible experience in which the register of the contemplative-sensible principle makes itself functional before the impulses of the context. The work, in its analogies and scientific correspondences, places itself in the threshold of nature’s phenomenalistic and ultra temporal world.
In the work of Inés Silva, the idea of a creation based on its properties and explained exclusively by its
cannot obviously be but «abstract», particularly, it will be shown in the dimension of the «abstraction» more than in the dimension of what is «abstract», not only because it establishes a significant and non renounceable nexus with the dimension of the reality «of the object», analyzed from its «objective» rationally transposition, but also starting from things that cannot just provoke but dystonia regarding what is «abstract». For example, the «lyric abstractionism» that starts, on the contrary, from the fantasying mind of the creator.
When we talk about this creative dimension of Inés Silva, we consider appropriate to also include other valid statements not only to support the participation of the artist in the «abstraction» group and not in the creative «abstract» group, but also to give an interpretative key of the constructive robustness that distinguishes her.
It could be easy for us to make reference, for example, to the Cézannian lesson and remember that the art of our time finds in that lesson the Coryphaeus and the Bishop of all new conception created during the XX century, precisely in the name of its fundamental intuition, which consisted in composing its works articulating the mixtures over a canvas that distributes the degradation of planes and volumes. The relation of all this with the «Cubism», for example, constitutes a widely explored territory by the critics and the art’s historiography.
Likewise, but with less evidence, ties appeared from this two movements with the «geometric» scansions. Nevertheless, these facts deserve a discussion that establishes determined explanations in order to not to take it all for granted and acquired. In this regard, the work of Inés Silva can contribute with a very useful and exemplary reference.
Now, a question arises between the Cézannian spatial articulation and the essential articulation of the geometry, what is the subsequent relation that can be established, after having correctly understood that both positions guarantee a simplification of the representation of things?
We would like to think that such formulation of this question intrinsically posses a contradiction, as from the moment in which it is necessary to understand the deepest meaning of the expression that we previously used regarding «simplification of the representation of things».
components (space, time, matter and energy) is not valid, and far from it, a work based on the sum of its components.
In her work there is the idea and the result of the idea: that is, she refuses to think that the work may exist just as an idea, simply because it will then be an incomplete idea: the shape is the vehicle of the idea —a smart combination, between the sum of space, time, matter and energy with the information and their combination: or the shape as a means to penetrate the reality of things, without putting at risk its fundamentals. How? By itself; from the moment the project, preventing its own production, becomes visible through an execution, impeccable per se, nevertheless human, and therefore subject to margins of work differentiation and reproducibility, even if they are imperceptible. In this regard, that is, the work reproducibility, there is great debate between those who wish that the artistic expression definition would only allow «unique» works and those who accept a scope widening, on behalf of a greater diffusion and visibility of art works.
The work of Inés Silva proceeds and it is presented by a series of geometric figures, straight lines arranged in horizontal vertical, diagonal, crossed or parallel; she reinvents herself in the artistic process, plays with variability and the intermittence of geometric structures: regularity, compactibility, variations and interweaved rhythms in a real spatiality —in the fruition time.
These are real and absolute paradoxes; Inés Silva contrasts her own experimentation, going to extremes, she does not fear to contradictions: the space of rationality, methodic, systematic, precise; clear and continuous variations of space-time rest on a network of multidirectional lines finished with conceptual measures: a universal definition of the event.
Saverio Cecere
Naples, May 1, 2009
English version published in the catalogue De Rerum Natura (2009).