David Castillo

Curated by Dorit Arad

David Castillo Gallery is pleased to present Look, Mom!, the first solo exhibition of Sebastian Silva.

Look, Mom! is a selection of drawings and paintings that explore the uncertain world of Silva’s sometimes comic characters. Silva shifts back and forth between clearly defined figures and abstracted forms that derive their mysterious nature and movement from gestural brushwork and variations on surface texture.

By endowing his forms with a shrouded meaning that disrupts the tranquility of seemingly simple and ingenuous things, Silva’s narratives evoke the aesthetic modes of magical realism. He combines real forms within a world that does not conform to daily reality, and still connotes the human preoccupation with eternity and change. In a series of works that illustrate a bizarre world that is constantly in flux, Silva transforms and mutates figures as they alternate from one defined form to another, sometimes evaporating into highly abstracted or unrecognizable entities.

In paintings and works on paper populated by wide-eyed creatures seemingly anxious in their surroundings, Silva unearths the patterns and threads of restlessness.  Dark and obscure in tone, his innocent characters hide behind their sometimes-blurred faces and ominous black voids. Riddled with an uncertainty, these characters traipse through their unstable environment with the weight of their unknown transgressions. By addressing their worried glances and taut gestures outwardly and beyond the picture-plane, they implicate the viewers as accomplices in their secrets.

Acclaimed for his numerous directorial film projects, including the award-winning film, La Nana (The Maid), Sebastian Silva was born in Santiago, Chile and lives and works in New York City. His recent film, Gatos Viejos (Old Cats) has been screened at the New York Film Festival and Sundance Film Festival and will have its theatrical release this summer.