Bela Silva: As far as the eye can see

After studying at the School of Fine Arts in Porto and Lisbon in Portugal, as well as at Ar.Co, at Norwich Fine Arts in England and the Art Institute of Chicago in the United States, Bela Silva is now an internationally renowned visual artist. She has been making her mark on the contemporary decorative and fine arts scene for over 35 years, challenging scale and aesthetic boundaries. She now lives between Lisbon, her hometown, Brussels and Paris.

On the occasion of this second solo exhibition at Spazio Nobile, parallel to other extramural exhibitions organised by the gallery, the painter, sculptor and ceramist explores the magic of the African earth. Bela Silva models it like a world without borders, where sculpture and drawing become narrative, and where emotion is conveyed through texture, scale and rhythm. A horizon line, her universe, evokes a freedom of gesture, movement and imagination, as far as the eye can see.

Her curious mind navigates between these multiple affiliations, making her a universal ‘woman of the world’ at the crossroads of cultures and civilisations. Her creations, with their generous, sinuous and sometimes totemic forms, reflect this dialogue between cultures, between nature and myth, between human fragility and pagan and animist power. Bela Silva models her ceramics and sketches her designs as one might draw a line in the sand or in the sky, in a continuity that is both imaginary and organic. Appearing and disappearing as if wandering through a labyrinth, she seeks the universal object or representation, building a bridge between the arts.

Fascinated by archaeology since the adolescence, her lively sculptures and paintings are born of a free and instinctive gesture, which could evoke the same magic and mystery as the paintings found in ancestral caves or prehistoric artefacts. “The decorative element or object has absolutely no pejorative connotation for me. In an ornamental detail discovered during my cultural travels, I can draw on the sophistication and symbolism of colour, as Michel Pastoureau evokes in his writings,” emphasises Bela Silva. “Art is immersive and it has saved me, reconnected me to the world and given me the oxygen to create. A painting such as Breughel’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, exhibited at the National Museum of Ancient Art, has been a real source of inspiration.”

Diving into waking dreams

The infinite line that runs through all her work is also that of dreams: a vegetal spiral, a mineral sparkle, a ramification that connects ancestral Japan, lush Brazil, telluric Africa and baroque Europe. À perte de vue (As far as the eye can see) is composed of intertwined horizons that overlap—those of her travel journals, her mental collections, her many readings and intuitions. These may be lines of colour, architectural elements, a phantasmagorical bestiary, or symbolic creatures and gardens. Through her exhibitions, her artistic creations become the free expression of a sensitive world, defining the contours of her inner territory. The lines of her drawings and sculptures are never fixed, but always expanding.

After her recent travels to Mexico, Brazil, Egypt and, more recently, Kenya, her drawings and sculptures suggest even more strongly this feeling of being: As far as the eye can see. The chromatic palette and the twirling dance of her brush are constantly renewed, at the source of being, like a breath, a dance, a trance. It is not enough for her to visit a museum or read a book: the artist seeks experience in the field, in order to give life and form to a lived experience and a true transhumance. This new body of work is inspired by colourful striped and patterned textiles and their bold combinations, as well as the elaborate and sophisticated jewellery and headdresses of the Maasai people she encountered on her last trip to Africa.

Through this sensory and chromatic immersion, Bela Silva continues her exploration of a world without borders, where the line is a beautiful escape – an ‘endless line’, like a vital force that runs through her artworks. Ceramics thus become a living ‘earth’, sometimes sculpted into volutes, horns, and interlacing patterns, sometimes into more graphic and geometric motifs, painted in an underlying manner, glazed transparently or with beautiful coloured enamels. The organic forms, half-plant, half-animal, seem to emerge from the earth and rise towards the sky. Here and there, the desert roads of the Masai Mara mingle with the vertical and horizontal grid of American cities such as Chicago and New York, where Bela Silva lived for several years.

A geology of being

Nourished by her Portuguese roots, Bela Silva has constructed an intimate geography where the influences of world cultures meet. Her artworks, sometimes monumental, sometimes more restrained and highly sophisticated, defy gravity while celebrating the sensuality of gesture and imperfection, hallmarks of humanity and impermanence. “Sculpture brings my drawings to life in three dimensions,” the artist emphasises. In addition, a sense of incompleteness remains at the heart of her work, for which there is no beginning and no end, but rather a life envisaged as an eternal renewal.

Her paintings in acrylic, gouache and Indian ink, mainly works on paper, extend this aesthetic of rhythm and vital movement. They capture, in fluid forms detached from any search for perspective, a memory of places, bodies and materials, a subtle cut-up or collage of moments captured on the spot. As far as the eye can see, her gaze traces invisible paths that connect here and elsewhere, earth and sky, mineral and plant, self and world.

More than an exhibition, À perte de vue is an invitation to abandon all linear logic and let oneself be carried away into a constantly expanding world, where the imagination flourishes freely, where each work is a stopover in a sensory and poetic universe. It is a whirlwind of scents and fleeting visions, fragments of memories that emerge from her collages composed of engravings and old papers that Bela Silva has collected over the years to give them a second life. Living memory thus springs forth like a fountain of youth, like a mirror that interrupts the passing of time. Life thus takes on a taste of eternity and shared joy, opening up to a perpetual cycle that will never cease to be… as far as the eye can see: an ocean, a desert or an infinite horizon, a line where time and space become as fluid as colour and light.

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