Patrick McCord, PhD - The Editing Company, Write Yourself Free

 

“We can choose whatever we desire, but we're not free to choose our desires."

---Shopenhauer

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“The true artist shows me something I’ve never seen before. At first, I may not even want to see it, but then, the more I look, the greater my reward.”

---Kristof Bergenweiller, “An Essay on Depiction” (Geneva 1921)

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With not quite the alacrity that Athena “sprang (fully armed) from the head of Zeus,” Michael Silverstein---in his first concentrated effort as an artist---has produced The Irento: a series of thematically linked paintings that have sprung “fully armed” from Silverstein’s imagination, revealing his special arsenal of bold and challenging painterly invention. Silverstein’s subject in The Irento is a timely one. In his dominant motif of the female form, he confronts us with the contemporary crises of the oppressive gaze: what do we see when we look at women? Silverstein's images demand: “What is the lived experience of powerful women if they are relieved of the cultural or commercial clichés of attraction?” While it’s an easy matter to recognize the gestalt figure of a female subject(s) in each painting, except for the caricature elements of hair and body outline, it’s impossible to parse the parts of the figure using conventional details of sexuality, beauty, or “femininity.” 

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With the direct simplicity of his figures, Silverstein is whimsically playing on conventional ways male artists have seen women, and we can recognize his references. There is something of the pin-up in Magdalena’s voluptuous outline; we sense a rhythmic gymnast in Moon Dance; Breakfast in the Park is a sly wink at Edouard Manet’s “Dejeuner sur l’Herb”; and Mother Geisha borrows subtly but unmistakably from Utamaro’s Yukio-e wood-block prints of vulnerable prostitutes in the “Floating World.”

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But a resemblance or a rhyme is all the correlation Silverstein will confide. While all the paintings have a lyric simplicity and formal elegance, and while Silverstein relies on curves and a Doris Day “flip” hairstyle to superficially characterize his subjects, closer examination shows a highly elaborated process that confounds any easy formulations of The Feminine, and instead, forces the viewer---male or female---into a crisis or rethinking the usual clichés that decipher the female image. In the process, the subject of each painting gains an unfamiliar emotional power in the crisis of our engagement with meaning-making.

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Notice how we want to narratize each image: discover the story from which the painting is the only revealed moment…  and how elusive the potential stories are. If Moon Dance is a woman is dancing, is she also juggling? Is she an acrobat in a Minoan arena? Or is she, like Shiva, dancing the cosmos into existence?

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Is Scope a reference to a rifle scope for which the inverted peace sign represents broken crosshairs? Who are the faceless figures enmeshed in the sighting, and what do we make of the sinister, if empty, hoodie behind them? 

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The Guardian offers us the most conventional female image, but also two unmistakably masculine brooding presences in the background. There is only one Guardian: is she guarding them? From what? She seems exposed and vulnerable, while they are both shadowy and menacing. Yet, she conveys poise and calm…  perhaps her super-power is her unafraid vulnerability.

Silverstein seems intent on changing any line into a wave, any solid mass into an undulation, and then finding waves and clouds in his margins to further enforce a sensation of unmoored imaginary fascination in what might be considered "feminine" terms. The surfaces of the canvases seem at once to be flattened images, but somehow also in their intensely textured surfaces and figure/ground suggestion, to show depth; we can see both, but only one at a time.

Then there’s Silverstein’s palate. The uninitiated viewer could be forgiven if the unfamiliar pink/red hue, silver sheen, and deep color saturation inspire a kind of wariness. There is something unnatural, even otherworldly in this focused and limited use of color that might at first discomfit the senses. 

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Yet, Silvestein’s original and daring use of color is like the discovery of a new precious metal: each painting’s coloration has such a profound weight in space that it magnetizes attention. Manet also dared to mix his paints in what critics of the time dismissed as “unnatural” coloration, yet today we know that Manet was innovating in ways that would lead to the modern movement. But he had to dare to do what no one had thought to do before.

Silverstein’s palate is unlike anyone else’s: severely limited, perhaps focused? his shimmering pinks, vibrant reds, and detailing in grey, white and black gives the canvases a vibratory intensity. Pink may be associated with girls, even little princesses, and red may be the color of lipstick and Louboutin heels, but once again, Silverstein’s sui generis method resists any easy connection to the contemporary image lexicon. What is clear is that his unique and disquieting use of color ensures that each painting has a “pop” to the eye, and is another implicit challenge to the viewer’s preconceived notions. 

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Which is, after all, the most definite theme in The Irento.   

   

"I don't really believe that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of writers he loves, but it's always nice, I'll grant you, if he has one."---JD Salinger

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Patrick McCord, PhD
The Editing Company, Write Yourself Free