With several notable public appearances in Venezuela and abroad to its credit—both before and after what, for many, constituted the revelation of its author’s talent, within the program of complementary activities organized in Caracas by the prestigious Festival A Tempo (2003) of the most current contemporary music—the work of Inés Silva is now presented in Venezuela with the full breadth of a solo exhibition. In a sense, this exhibition formally marks her true debut in our cultural milieu (something like the alternativa, the ceremony in which a novice bullfighter is confirmed as a full-fledged matador), even though she is no newcomer, for, as we have already noted, Inés Silva has taken part in several important national and international exhibitions, among them one at the Madi Museum in Dallas, Texas, where she appeared alongside other representatives of Venezuelan geometric abstract art.
In this solo exhibition, presented at the Centro de Bellas Artes de Maracaibo—one of the finest exhibition spaces in the country—Inés Silva shows a group of three-dimensional works selected from her most recent production. All of them belong to a highly rigorous and refined geometric abstraction, and are made with transparent plastic sheets in various colors, or at times colorless sheets painted with lines or bands of color.
The transparency of the Plexiglas sheets allows the perception of the work to vary according to the angle from which it is viewed, so that the work diversifies and becomes multiple and changing; it varies, too, with the angle of the light that illuminates it. All of this, together with the combinatorial play of planes and forms, underlies the formal and visual richness of the works.
Since the use of Plexiglas sheets in Soto’s early works, no one in Venezuela had made better use of this appealing material than Inés Silva. That is one of the keys to her success and the principal characteristic of her work.
What predominates in these works by Inés Silva is not the idea of the language of art (there is no single language of art), but the concrete manifestation of her own language, which asserts its worth in itself, in what is specific to it, without being made to serve as a referential instrument for the representation of some motif drawn from external reality.
A work by Inés Silva is not merely a material object, but an object that entails a process of ideation and elaboration, inspired by prior concepts and models that are reformulated and articulated in the work. What we perceive when we look at it is not the work itself but a visual reading of it—a version of that work, which had to be deciphered (or decoded) and subjected to the analysis and the intellectual and emotional participation of the beholder.
The quality of these works by Inés Silva is a fresh demonstration, if any were needed, that the art of geometric abstraction has lost neither its relevance nor its legitimacy in Venezuela. Nor anywhere else.
Perán Erminy
Translated from the Spanish.