Steve Silver: Empirical Horizons at Westwood Gallery

Installation View of Steve Silver: Empirical Horizons at Westwood Gallery NYC, New York, 2024. Photo: Westwood Gallery NYC
Courtesy the artist and Westwood Gallery NYC. Artwork © Steve Silver

By YOHANNA M ROA September 6, 2024

Upon entering Westwood Gallery, my eyes were drawn to an iridescent sunset that shifted in hues as I moved further into the space. This is a composition of three horizontal paintings: The Distance Of Silence #1 (2016), The Distance Of Silence #2 (2016), and The Distance Of Silence #3 (2016), along with eight horizontally arranged cubes, Heraclitus Or Rocket Science #8.1-8.8 (2016). This ensemble, perfectly installed to reflect changes in light, gave me the sensation of walking through the artist's studio in Brooklyn and observing a magnificent sunset through the windows. The tones range from saturated pink to vibrant white, with orange and yellow hues. Upon closer inspection, it becomes evident that the works consist of a series of meticulously painted squares, which enhances the experience of traversing a large window of the artist's studio.

Steve Silver is an innate painter who has produced work incessantly over the past 45 years. After studying at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City, Silver wrote poetry and taught literature at Hofstra University. In 1977, while hitchhiking from Mexico City to Lima, he experienced an epiphany atop a coal truck, realizing he was destined to become a painter. Due to this background, his work is rich with literary references; the titles of some of his pieces are direct quotes from certain authors or neologisms created by the artist to highlight the roots or connections between distant places and cultures that converge through the physical experience of his art. And The Key is Turned is a direct citation from W. B. Yeats' poem VI The Stare's Nest By My Window, where the metaphor "The bees build in the crevices / Of loosening masonry" is employed to address social issues and political movements. In the artwork, our gaze delves deeply into observing physical reality's mutable and shifting nature, which leads us to reflect on the labyrinthine figure, built by small and perfect squares made of vibrant white and emerald green.

Installation View of Steve Silver: Empirical Horizons at Westwood Gallery NYC, New York, 2024. Photo: Westwood Gallery NYC. Courtesy the artist and Westwood Gallery NYC. Artwork © Steve Silver

In the Platagram series, the title is a neologism derived from the intersection of the Spanish word ¨plata¨, meaning silver (and curiously the artist's surname), and gram, from the Greek for 'letter' or 'piece of writing.' This body of work presents a series of horizons that vibrate with volumes approaching sculpture. In a warm yet radical minimalism, the series allows us to experience the artworks in a symphony of materialities and colors, where abstraction and gesture converge with the experience of the concrete, transforming two-dimensional matter into forms that nearly touch us and remind us of the visual compositions of Brazilian concrete poetry.

Platagram is a key work for contextualizing Steve Silver's art. On one hand, the reference to the Greek root gram draws us closer to the verses of "Ithaka" by the Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy: "Hope your road is a long one," says the poet. When Jason and the Argonauts left Ithaca in search of the Golden Fleece, they did so with the promise of returning. As they journeyed from port to port and adventure to adventure, their ship sustained damage and required countless repairs, each made with the materials and labor available at each location. Upon their return, they had the same vessel but constructed with entirely different materials. In this intersection, visual imagery merges with literary imagery. Silver has developed a working process in which each piece represents a journey, transforming each pictorial object as decisions and accidents alter and shape the work. Ultimately, in a radically conceptual act, the artist redefines the work by bestowing it with a neologism as its title, integrating Spanish and Greek roots to use words as a binding force that solidifies the work.

Palisades, 2010-11. Acrylic, interference acrylic on wood, 85 x 100 x 5 in. Installation View of Steve Silver: Empirical Horizons at Westwood Gallery NYC, New York, 2024. Photo: Westwood Gallery NYC. Courtesy the artist and Westwood Gallery NYC. Artwork © Steve Silver

This working process is evident throughout much of the body of work presented in the exhibition. In Palisades (2010-11), we observe a polyptych consisting of ten vertical pieces. The artist began by painting the panels sequentially, applying color and altering the tones from left to right. Upon examining them on his workbench, he reimagined them as a landscape, rearranged their order, and displayed them vertically, ultimately naming the work Palisades. Therefore, when I describe Steve Silver as an innate painter, I am not referring solely to his evident mastery of painting techniques or the precision and cleanliness of his lines and color planes. I am referring to the natural way he employs painting as a contemporary language, articulating and constituting meaning in each piece in connection with the socio-historical context.

A noteworthy aspect is the exquisite integration of the exhibition title with the curation by James Cavello. From any point within the exhibition space, our bodies are situated within a pictorial horizon, where Silver's works emerge as physical experiences that constitute the landscape. Empirical Horizons, Steve Silver's solo show at Westwood Gallery, highlights and foregrounds the work of a mature artist who has incessantly produced an extensive body of work. This body of work allows us to immerse ourselves in an experience that is simultaneously concrete, abstract, and conceptual. WM