Diatessiraq is the title of a new painting by Marc Silva, a self-taught artist who works very slowly but whose paintings should not be missed. Silva works in his own world with its own language. The titles of his works sound like Old English or Latin, though they usually are invented words. In Diatessiraq, his archaic language fits like a glove around his image of fragmented stone hands touching an engraved tablet. The hands – Silva often paints his own hands in different fossilized settings – are both tense and sinuous, as if the missing appendage of a great Roman statue has wandered off, but they also seem alive and autonomous, like Thing from The Addams Family. The fingers push down actively on the cracks as if they’re walking or standing. The script on the stone is impossible to read. It looks like it was engraved by several ancient cultures, and then the tablet was broken and reassembled at some later point. I’ve known Silva personally for seven years. He told me once that when he is glazing and painting at his slow, methodical pace that he feels like he is using the brush to dust the sand off of a buried relic, to unearth something that was already there. He began painting these careful, mystical works after doing undergraduate work in physics. He seems to draw from man’s historical attempts at understanding the workings of the world around him.
Marc Silva’s new work will be on view through Oct. 30 at Studio 2 Gallery, 1700 S. Lamar. For more information, call 448-2622.
This article appears in October 8 • 2004.