Viviane Silvera: On my way (selections from an ongoing project)

Edward Hopper House presents an exhibition featuring Viviane Silvera's ongoing series, “Film Project: Therapy," on view from Sept. 3 through Nov. 2, 2014.   The series pays homage to Edward Hopper’s work through the literal and unspoken relationships between light, the psychological, the solitary, and the cinematic--dominant themes in Hopper’s work.

In her last two series of paintings; Therapy: Part One (2011) and Therapy: Part Two (2013), Silvera used film images as source material for paintings. extracting and re-imagining compositions from film stills that deal with the subject of psychotherapy.  In this current project, Silvera created her own film using two actors, about a therapy session, from which she is creating paintings, a selection of which are shown here. 

Starting with a screen image as a point of departure, Silvera abstracts the figures, transforming the specific into the archetypal during the translation from film still to painted image—leaving the narrative up to the viewer’s imagination.  The interior setting is as important in conjuring a narrative and a mood as the figures themselves.  Shadowy interiors became metaphors for the struggle between the conscious and unconscious, the past and present, and what is illuminated versus what remains mysterious and unknown. 

Through framing, light, and mood, the paintings speak to Hopper's influence on contemporary painting, as well as cinema and photography.  Silvera's aim is to create psychologically charged, powerfully cinematic paintings with an unresolved narrative.  

The project will conclude with editing the paintings (which have been shot as a stop-motion, throughout the painting process) into a short film.  Thus the images began in film, were re-imagined and re-created as paintings, and will go back into film, transformed.