CHARLIE DUTTON
GALLERY
1a Princeton Street, London WC1R 4AX
www.charlieduttongallery.com
PRESS RELEASE PRESS RELEASE
PRESS RELEASE
PRESS RELEASE
new work by
MIKE SILVA
Private View 24th October 6-9pm
25th October - 8th December 2012
Mike Silva's work represents an art without ideals; that is
to say without a transforming imaginary, or a formal
symbolic, but an attempt to picture the world as he finds
it, without embellishment. For Silva the photograph is a
source of realism, precisely for what it does not show. In
the nineteenth century, realism was about building a
totality, finding within the contingency of the world a
universal principle. Today, the photograph is the only
realism we trust; yet we are also aware that the photograph
is only a fragment.
Silva revels in this fragmented realism, and builds his
pictures from disparate parts, parts that we may wish to
piece together, or form a narrative around, but are unable
to. The pictures embody a sense of random urban encounters,
whose ultimate meaning is absent- we are left with
something akin to raw experience.
Silva's paintings are demonstrations of a technical
mastery that has always come naturally to him. What gives
his work its edge, however ,is his refusal to sublimate or
romanticise. There is no art in his compositions- not even
CHARLIE DUTTON
GALLERY
1a Princeton Street, London WC1R 4AX
www.charlieduttongallery.com
a postmodern poetry, as one might find in the work of David
Salle for example. What we are presented with is a kind of
raw data of the artist's life, presented with an apparent
neutrality- its the straightforwardness, the ordinariness
of the artists imagery, whether it be personal or
political, that allows us the viewer to connect directly
with these works. A lack of gloss or pretension however,
does not finally mitigate against the artists real
intentions; a desire to find beauty in the everyday, to
present this beauty as it is found.
Without morality or meaning, beauty nevertheless provides
sustenance, an elusive goal, waiting to be uncovered in the
ordinary world of people places and things.Never taking the
aesthetic for granted, Silva seeks it out in the worldthese paintings are a record of that quest.
Dan Coombs