Monica Silva

LUX ET FILUM 

A CONTEMPORARY VISION OF CARAVAGGIO 

This project have been supported with the cultural patronage of the State of Sao Paulo's Government that defined: Lux et Filum a project of cultural and social relevance contributing significantly to the diffusion of culture" 

"Caravaggio was one of the leading exponents in the baroque painting, he masterfully portrayed the society of his time through careful observation of his environment with a deep psychological reading of the human being. Lux Et Filum, (in Latin, light and canvas ), does not only  inspires to his best-known works, it exhumes them,  by placing a simple question: How would those same paintings be portrayed today by Caravaggio?  In these photographs I experimented my 'chiaroscuro' through the shades of colors in the light, and the homogeneity of the elements in the set. The only near example of the chiaroscuro in Caravaggio' style, is seen in the portrait of the italian pianist Stefano Bollani, ironically inspired to Medusa. For the entire work the characters remain the same but undergo a transformation, the poses are those  well known, but the meaning given is muted, the much loved  "chiaroscuro" so dear to the great artist, that let characters and objects emerge out from the darkness,  in a non contextualized backgrounds, is replaced by uniformed pastel tones and solid colors,  keeping the same function: show the caracters suspended in non-set places, describing them simply by objects and furniture in the composition.

Personally the project Lux Et Filum , came to light  from a stratified roam of unconscious feelings and poetry. A sort of a return to the womb of existential rebirth  from a saturated and often controversial ego,   where the will, my will, is to preserve the values and memories often kept in a box deposited on a shelf and remained in oblivion. Rummaging inside it, one can end up discovering a container filled with awe of tracks assembled for sentimental or, in fact, for auto biographical reasons. The items in the box are not actors in a "˜horror vacui', or a so to say, a "˜dis-ordered' filling of objects, in this chaos-order of emotions, there's a synthesis, a search for a round  sensible meaning.

The love I feel for my life, for art itself, oscillates within all my senses at the point of often finding it  in a intimate, unconscious level.  they are in my portraits and commercial works as a physiological need of the memory, to make room for gaining momentum to change or simply  nihilism. My past, full of violence and existential disharmonies, uses  art, basicly photography, protecting me to remain unscathed thanks to "estrangements" in parallel realities that exist only in my mind. This led me to  perform today the same operation of which I am serving for Lux Et Filum. " Monica Silva