Roberta Silva

Studio Casoli, Rome
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With her new work Roberta Silva reconfirms her position as a sophisticated remodeller of space. She creates suggestive environments pervaded by a disturbing sense of danger, silent and perplexing places that invite viewers to stop and question accepted perceptive modalities.

A cavity has been dug in one of the gallery’s rooms; part of the terracotta paving has been removed and there emerges, almost oozing from the earth, a substance, cold and silver, a strange kind of spring—surprising for its location—of whose origins and nature we are unaware. The surface, tranquil and reflective, could be considered a revisit to the pool of Narcissus, still besotted with the mystery of his reflected image.

The material is mercury, a metal that denies its solid nature and bears the name of a planet and the messenger of the gods—the deity of dreams and the arts, protector of wanderers, thieves, merchants, and the spirits of the dead. It is a highly toxic metal, the main ingredient in the most crucial phase of the alchemical process.

It turns out to be difficult to escape from the closely woven network of metaphors to which the piece refers. Silva exploits to the maximum the ambiguous nature of the symbol—the richer in connotations, preferably contradictory, the more effective it is. However, this does not deny the possibility of a more reasoned approach toward the piece.

Platonic philosophy is permeated by the idea that the visible world was born out of a narcissistic error: Man fell in love with his reflected image and the shadow of a perfect world. The perceptible world was nothing other than the result of a reflection, which thus became the essential origin of reality.

Roberta Silva’s work places us directly in front of a new genesis. In the absolute simplicity of her intercession, the artist succeeds in turning us into participants of a regenerative action, revealing the narcissistic experience as crucial to creation. She is a dangerous manufacturer of appearances in which one can lose one’s way, a fundamental element of the artistic process and the only path that leads to the truth.




Marcello Smarrelli
Translation by Amanda Coulson