This exhibition is titled «Jardinés colgantes», with an accent on the “e”, and the way it sounds when spoken aloud is entirely intentional. The wordplay fuses, on the one hand, the artist’s name, Inés, with “jardines”, the Spanish word for gardens; on the other, it alludes to the series that predominates in the exhibition: her jardines colgantes, or hanging gardens.
The recent pieces are the outcome of an investigation the artist began years ago. This allows us to speak of two stages, marked by similarities and differences that stem from a creative process in which reflection and a capacity for innovation prevail. Certain elements remain common to both moments: the material used (acrylic), transparency, space, color and light. A clear geometric and structural definition also endures.
Although all of this persists and forms an essential part of Inés’s visual language, it must be said that the differences are so marked that they draw a line between a before and an after. In the earlier gardens, the chromatic elements were affixed to a single, whole, transparent sheet of acrylic, so that the work as a whole was distinguished by its fixity and verticality. In the current works she no longer relies on a single support to hold them together. Her system is modular: each of the elements that make up a piece is independent of the others, and they are assembled according to an order and a proportional relationship. This shows that the reasoning of the golden ratio and the use of the Modulor—the unit of measurement employed by Le Corbusier, which Inés has applied in earlier series—persist in the present work.
Indeed, this has allowed her to exchange elliptical and circular forms for rectilinear figures—the square, for instance, which she works in different sizes. She assembles these colored square sheets with transparent ones, achieving an organization that unfolds in a spiral and in progression. This has two interesting consequences. The first is the dynamic quality these new jardines colgantes now possess: the spiral form is intrinsically dynamic, but these are also works with an axis of rotation which, together with the viewer’s interaction, keeps them constantly turning. The accents of color are thus in perpetual motion.
The second consequence is the germinative character of these gardens—a term that lends the works, despite their geometry, a distinctly organic connotation. Not only does their appearance change as they turn; owing to the modular system, the progressive arrangement of the elements and the technique of assembly, they are also open to transformation: to growth. With the addition of further sheets of acrylic, we find ourselves before an open, expandable work, the result of a reasoned and flexible use of geometry.
Without abandoning acrylic as the leading material of her production, Inés Silva introduces mirror and metal into some of her recent works. Whereas transparency allows space to be incorporated into the work, the mirror replicates that space as well, and with it the viewer. The gold- and chrome-plated aluminum wires, for their part, allow her to work with line according to a criterion quite different from that of the “virtual frame” we see in the edges of the transparent acrylic sheets. These are now physical, corporeal lines, seen in relief on a flat acrylic support and arranged in a spiral or in a progression of squares, all in keeping with golden-ratio proportion.
In light of all this, the permanently luminous condition of Inés’s work deserves emphasis. These are pieces of which the surroundings and the light seem to form a part. This may be inferred even in those with a black ground, if we regard their sheen as a mirroring condition in which reality is replicated and in which we, too, are contained. It is, in short, a geometry that is exact and expansive in every sense.
Susana Benko
Art researcher and independent curator. Member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA-Venezuela).
Translated from the Spanish.