Nacho Martín Silva

Nacho Martín Silva - Magic and the Judges

Technique: Oil on canvas

Artist Biography: The work of Nacho Martín Silva is articulated around a painting projected from concerns linked to concepts such as the fragmentary, the simulacrum and representation or the plausible. Taking the history of art and humanity or the creative process itself as axes, Martin Silva, maintains a constant concern about how to deal with the Theme background through painting, resulting in a polysemic work that takes different directions in its formalization. Nacho Martín Silva holds a degree in Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid, where he lives and works. His most recent solo projects include Il futuro non è ciò che era, curated by Tolo Cañellas, at Box 27 (Palma), and Tirar del hilo hasta quedar ciego at JosédelaFuente (Santander) in 2017, and El Gran Estudio, curated by Ángel Calvo Ulloa, at Centro de Arte de Alcobendas (Madrid) in 2016. He has participated in group exhibitions in museums, galleries and international institutions such as Galerie Sobering in Paris, Espacio Odeón in Bogotá and OTR Espacio de Arte in Madrid, among others, and his work has been shown in the latest editions of the ARTBO (Bogotá) and ARCO Madrid fairs. He has been awarded the Pilar Juncosa and Sotheby's Prize for Artistic Creation in 2017, and his work is the subject of analysis in the publication Nacho Martín Silva by Juan Francisco Rueda published by Nocapaper in 2016.

 

Martín Silva starts from photographic images to compose, through different pictorial resources as if they were literary forms, paintings that oscillate between the recognizable and the suggested, forcing the viewer to an arduous exercise of reflection before the image and inviting him to abandon himself to the enjoyment of the painting as a fact. The painting is based on a photograph by Hermann Landshoff in which Leonora Carrington, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp and André Breton are portrayed in NY 1942. Among the different canvases that make up the painting, Martín Silva introduces some that represent the childhood drawings of his daughter and some of her friends, which they sometimes make in the artist's studio. The freshness, simplicity and intuition of these children's gestures coexist with academic and conceptualized ways of understanding painting in a sincere exercise of admiration for what we could understand as magical thinking and for the unexpectedness of painting. Not in vain, the title. "Magic and the judges", alludes to the story included in the book of Daniel and represented by Tintoretto "Susanna and the old men" in which a young woman "very beautiful and God-fearing", wife of the rich Joachim, who is spied on by two old men during the bath. They try to force her to have sex with them, telling her that, if she does not agree, they will say that she has been left alone, without her maids, to be with a young man. Susana does not give in to their threats. Then the old men accuse her of adultery and get her condemned to death. Then the prophet Daniel intervenes who, questioning the elders, ends up proving the falsity of the accusation, so that Susanna is saved and the elders were executed. The painting observed by Duchamp (who will proclaim the death of painting) and Max Ernst could well be a metaphor for Susana and the observers of the judges; the canvases that do not represent children's drawings in Nacho's painting could well be about the judges and those who copy the children's motifs of magic... The readings of Martín Silva's paintings are as many as the looks they receive.