Leah Ollman

Lighthouse: Recent Works by Ernest Silva

Exhibition catalogue, Essay by Leah Ollman.

Presented with the permission of :
Leah Ollman and the University of Rhode Island.

A lighthouse appears often in Ernest Silva's work as a beacon of hope, a guide to safe harbor. In this self-satisfied dawn of the 3rd millennium, in a culture that fetishizes speed and the shrewd calculation of quantifiable assets, Silva's art is, in itself, a safe haven, an affirmation of profoundly human instincts and experiences.

While our means of communication push forward on a path of relentless technological progress (shedding dials and wires and wait time), what we say-what we need to say-to one another changes little. Our individual journeys toward connection with the self and others continue, at a pace that defies acceleration-the pace of breath, slow and rhythmic.

Silva's discrete, slightly restless brushstrokes join in a loose weave. The touch of the artist's hand is evident throughout, and primary to the work's impact as authentic traces of a man who regards himself as a work-in-progress. His fluid brushwork and the raw, faceted surfaces of his sculptures in wood echo this condition of low-level flux, the never-ending state of becoming. We yearn for closure, Silva admits, but we also fear it, for closure means death-if not physically, at least for the imagination. The literal is a kind of suffocation that Silva resists, placing his trust instead in the less settled, but eminently richer resources of memory, association and intuition.

The core images that Silva uses and reuses-for over 20 years now-comprise a vocabulary of voyage. That Silva continues to "circle back" to the boat, the man holding a lantern, the deer, the lighthouse and the sea simply attests to their inexhaustibility as symbols of journey. The lighthouse stands as a beacon to the solitary seafarer or wanderer, but is also suggestive of any source that serves to clarify. The man holding a lantern is, in effect carrying his own private lighthouse, luminous insurance against the disorientation of total darkness. A surrogate for Silva as much as for any of us, the man appears pensive, stoic. He is usually seen standing, pausing from the journey, assessing his course.

Deer, too, are shown in a brief interval of inaction. Pausing from a drink or upon entering a clearing, they look up and gauge their surroundings.They read as delicate, vulnerable beings, acutely sensitive and watchful. Fire, volcanoes, rafts, burning logs, the threshold where land and water meet-Silva has his own recurring associations with these images, each equivalents to a certain state of mind. But the vocabulary is familiar enough, and Silva's style so sensually inviting, that the work opens out to us, generously, from its intensely personal source, and serves as a stage for a more universal narrative of love and longing.
Silva's work tracks the soul's perpetual navigation between isolation and union in the form of a poetic chronicle of stills. Women, naked, pure, and available, emblematize promise, connection. The journey may appear to hold woman as the destination, but every search carries twin goals-reaching the object of desire, and returning, more deeply, to the self. Circling back is central to the process. Each lap delivers us altered, both nourished and challenged by the new cycle's diet of dreams. Silva's romanticism is obvious, yet he feels slightly embarrassed by it, apologetic even, as if psychic self-scrutiny was a retrograde indulgence. Intimacy and unintellectualized emotion are, in fact, rarely sited in the hippest echelons of today's art world. Status there is secured by irony and cool distance, the visual equivalents of a shrug and a blithe, "Whatever...."

In contrast, Silva's work is grounded in what endures-love, longing, belonging and evolving-and these, in fact, will only go out of style when our species does, and perhaps not even then. His is an existentialism as pared down as the ancient Cycladic figures his sculpted women resemble. His work, a prolonged meditation on the basic ingredients of being--body, soul, earth, mind-and his drawings, paintings, sculptures "the visualization of questions." What constitutes safe harbor? What is a cage, what is a shelter? What are the necessary risks in this necessary journey? As we negotiate a path between vulnerability and the assured presence of self, do we, like the man with the lantern, truly possess our own beacon?

A single burning log floats beneath the moon in one of the recent paintings. Like each of us, it is but a splinter from a larger tree. Its flames give light and heat, but also threaten to consume it.

A man and a woman have birdcages where their heads should be. Are the vessels of our minds so confining? So porous? Silva's cages might be empty, occupied by a bird, or filled with carved human heads. It is the multiplicity of our being that intrigues him, how we yearn for some kind of unification so we're not pulled apart by opposing forces, desires, motivations, but "if we found that one thing, we'd be dead." We thrive, as evolving souls, not on the security of closure, but on the friction generated by our multiplicity, our interior fragmentation. Our yearning for wholeness is one of those fundamentals that endures, and it sends melancholy drifting through Silva's work like a plangent song in notes of coral, blue-black, violet and gold. How to steer our tiny craft through the turbulence of years without being subsumed by our yearning to arrive? We come to depend on the things that sustain us- our dreams, our visions. Silva's work is an act of survival, a manner of seeking sustenance, and certainly, of providing it.