Puddle V

Location

Country: Morocco
City: Rabat
Place: British Embassy

Mike Silva is known for his photorealist style of painting, which is often applied to portraits of men – friends, lovers or simply those he has met or seen in passing and photographed. Silva works from photographs, which he considers to be a powerful method of remembering. In the two works in this Collection, the human subject is notably absent. The focus instead is on light, and the frame and camera angle that would have been used for the photograph. This angle suggests to the viewer a sense of them having been in this natural environment themselves, perhaps of having recorded this particular scene. Playing with colour and white paint to convey a sense of the natural light, the paintings invite the viewer in, communicating a feeling of the intimacy that we might experience when looking at a photograph that evokes a personal memory or the sadness we might feel at the loss of a moment of time that we can never return to. Silva has spoken about the poignancy created by the time-lag of taking a photograph and then, many years later, translating this into paint. His works could be said to hold a similar poignancy for his viewers, conveying a sense that these paintings are not simply of a landscape or place but also of a specific moment in time. 

Silva was born in Sweden and had a peripatetic childhood. He has described how, when he was younger, taking photographs was a way of anchoring himself through those constant moves. “Memory and longing,’ he says, ‘is something we project onto an image. The photographic image is rooted in the time and place that it was taken – it is fixed to that specific moment. Whereas a painting can appear to always seem in the present because it’s been divorced from the exact point in time it originally refers to, it has a more universal quality”.

Mike Silva was born in Sandviken, Sweden. He received a BFA from Middlesex University, London in 1989 before completing an MA in Fine Art from the Royal College of Art, London. Solo exhibitions of his work have been held at various galleries in the UK, the US and Europe including most recently Anton Kern Gallery in New York (2022); The Approach, London (2020); The Annexe, London (2019); Farbvision, Berlin (2018). His work has also been shown at group exhibitions including at Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Timothy Taylor Gallery, London (both 2021); Copeland Gallery, London (2019); Kingsgate Projects, London and Barbara Thumm Gallery, Berlin (both 2017) and Whitechapel Gallery, London (2010).

Places

Subjects

landscape C21st, tree, birch, sunlight, rain, puddle, forest, woodland, path

Materials & Techniques

canvas, oil, oil painting

Artist

Mike Silva (1970 - )

Title

Puddle V

Date

2002

Medium

Oil on canvas

Dimensions

height: 183.50 cm, width: 132.00 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from Anthony Wilkinson Gallery, August 2002

Inscription

none

Provenance

Anthony Wilkinson Gallery, London

GAC number

17726