ART REVIEW : SLIVA BRINGS PASSION, PERSONALISM TO PAINTINGS

Ernest Silva’s new work at the Quint Gallery enhances his position as one of the stellar artists in this area with an emerging national reputation. It’s a modest exhibition of a dozen drawings and one large painting, but it is a visually rich experience that merits time for contemplation.

In the works that make up “Painting in Paradise,” as the show is entitled, Silva continues to explore familiar themes while introducing sufficient variety to advance beyond where he has been and entice us to speculate about where he will go next.

Silva has for at least half a dozen years been recognized nationally as a significant figure in the revival of expressionism in painting. Instead of the cool and distanced, back-to-basics minimalist approach to sculpture and painting (and other art forms) that dominated much of the 1970s in American art, Silva offers us passion and personalism akin to the American Abstract Expressionists of the 1940s and 1950s, such as Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and Franz Kline.

Where these great ones offered us heroic passion with transcendent spiritual concerns, however, often on a scale so large that their paintings were viewed and sometimes created as environments for viewers to enter, Silva offers us intimate works for intellectual and sensual delectation. In place of the Abstract Expressionists’ (and some 19th-Century American artists’) yearnings for the sublime, Silva gives us allusions to earlier masters whose work he admires, French as well as American. In place of religion, Silva gives us art history.

Silva’s background as a poet doubtless has strongly influenced his development as a visual artist. He consistently uses concrete but evocative, figurative symbols as a vocabulary of forms. He equally consistently implies a narrative content or dramatic scenario. It may be elusive, as well as allusive, but it nevertheless is there.

The protagonist in Silva’s stories is a male figure, a combined scarecrow-rogue-artist who wears a conical hat. In earlier works this patchwork character appeared disreputable and malevolent--an outsider, even a thief, whose repressed violent feelings were represented by the resemblance of his hat to a volcano. He might have been caught leering at a nude, recumbent doll-like woman, beautiful but dumb, through a window.

His early unhappy environments were forests that had seemingly been blasted by some catastrophe, perhaps a forest fire or atomic bomb. Sere trees gesticulated like human figures in painful but dance-like poses. A recurring art-historical reference was Henri Rousseau’s painting “War,” with a girl brandishing a sword and a torch while riding a galloping horse.

Silva distinctively used a three-dimensional format like a shadow box to create paintings of cutout forms in relief. In the expressionist tradition, he used a high-key, emotive but limited palette of blue, puple, green, orange, yellow and red in vigorous markings in shallow impasto. His charcoal drawings integrated the frame with the drawing through the repetition of the artist’s characteristic nervous, emphatic strokes.

In the new drawings at the Quint Gallery, the palette and markings are the same but the characters and their environment have changed. For scenes of desolation he has substituted environments that promise sensual, especially erotic, satisfaction.

The rogue has lost his sinister qualities. Now he is a painter. With an easel standing nearby, he gazes from his plane beyond a framed area into an exotic scene. In place of repressed violence--the hat is no longer a volcano, it is just a hat--there is inquisitiveness. The painter is, like us, a viewer instead of a “voyeur” with its connotation of lascivious intent. Often he gazes upon a nude woman, either standing or reclining against a South Seas background of shore, ocean, palm trees, beach hut and setting sun.

Although Silva uses sketches of live models as he works, he also makes allusions to the nudes of Cezanne, Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso, and to their interest in exotic places. He may also allude to other art-historical antecedents, as in “Painter, Brother and Falling Easel,” with its references to Vincent van Gogh, his brother Theo, a well-known painting of crows in a field, and the onset of the artist’s madness.

The format of these new drawings with their illusion of three distinct planes indicates Silva’s modified use of the shadow box, with the rogue in silhouette standing on a shelf and gazing into framed, relief paintings.

As to content, the artist seems to be satisfied to rest in Paradise awhile.

Also on view at the Quint Gallery is a splendid sampling of works by other artists that the gallery represents, including Kenneth Capps, Italo Scanga, Manny Farber and Kim MacConnel.

The exhibition continues through March 8.