16.09.2017, Edition Patrick Frey

The Master With The Sharpest Knife In Town

By Stephanie Rebonati
Translation: Eric Rosencrantz

There’s so much and yet so little to say about 33-year-old artist Francisca Silva. So much because her work is a garish fusion of poetry, sculpture, painting, drawing, textiles and tattoos. So little because she doesn’t like talking about herself or her work. “I could spout sentimental nonsense,” she says, “but I don’t want to kill my art with words.”

Francisca Silva is a tough girl, a macho, a lesbian. She was born to Chilean refugees in Ticino in 1984, went to school in Italy, studied fine arts in Zürich, moved to Berlin in 2012 and returned to Switzerland in 2015, only to leave again two years later. She is now based in Brooklyn. Short and round, her body is an ever-evolving work of art in and of itself: she wears “jewelry”, as she calls her tattoos, on her neck, arms, legs, belly and head, most of which she designs and inks herself. A sea of clouds, an axe, a dolphin, a naked doll. A question in quivering letters: “Are you going to break my heart?”

Francisca Silva tattoos others, too. In tattoo studios and artist-run spaces, at performances, exhibition openings and readings everywhere from Lugano to Berlin, from Seoul to Chicago and New York. Kitted out with her ink and iron, she calls herself “Fra Macho”. “Macho” is also the name of her one-woman publishing house, and the word is indelibly inked into her left thigh as well.

“Macho” sums up one of the cycles that mark her view of herself as an artist, cycles and phases that have already given rise to a dense and multi-faceted oeuvre. But her self-styled machismo and tattoos are only one facet of her work. Equally important and impressive are her extravagantly designed walk-through cardboard installations, the first of which was publicly displayed in 2012 at the Helmhaus in Zürich. One such installation comprises a cave, painted white on the outside, with an eclectic and colorful collage of self-portraits, drawings, cut-outs and vagina-shaped sculptures on the inside. It’s called “This Is Not a Love Story”. And yet that’s precisely what Silva’s art is: an expression of her ambivalent love story with the folly and beauty of this world. In 2013 she constructed an even bigger and more colorful installation at the Kunstmuseum Baselland with an even more cryptic title: “Makumba - Temple of YOLO” (“YOLO” as in “you only live once”). And it just happened to trigger the start of a new cycle in Basel.

Brushed or sprayed on with a mere flick of the wrist, Silva christened her short curves of color Würmchen and first showed them publicly in 2014 at the Municipal Gallery of Bern. A sea of little worms swimming towards the viewer. Multi-colored and executed on various media, including canvasses and large bed sheets trimmed with triangles of Caribbean batik fabric, T-shirts dangling from the ceiling on heavy metal chains, sweatshirts and caps. The exhibition was titled “Francisca Silva”. “The worms are a joke,” she said at the time with a grin on her earnest face.

The worms were followed by something that wasn’t merely another cycle, but another genre altogether: Silva started writing. And she called her word combinations “poetry”. Not sayings or slogans, but “poetry”, as though the very word were the most precious thing in the world. Silva’s poetry is dead serious. Though not humorless. Sexy, maybe. Mischievous, most likely. Unfiltered and unrefined, childlike, one might say, but definitely not childish.

In 2015, at her first solo show at Zürich’s Hermann Germann Contemporary gallery, Silva’s suspended bed sheets were studies in pain. Sublime pain spreading as silently as fog when something comes to an end. The paintings were as loud as ever, to be sure, the letters sharp and clear, the colors sprayed on in lavish sweeping gestures. And yet their content weighed heavy. They hung innocently from the ceiling, in a staggered arrangement spread out liberally in the exhibition space, making showgoers feel they’d wandered into a multicolored labyrinth.

I’M THE CODE BETWEEN YOUR LEGS

IF IT’S NOT YOU / I GO HOME

CAN’T FEEL

The handwritten words on linen were the result of a struggle that Silva had waged with herself. She struggled to drive out demons. And she won. She left the battlefield victorious, even calling herself “Samurai” for a while, and tattooed the words “POET OF YOUR HEART” on her neck. For she had discovered words, language. She’d already been writing for some time, but this was the first time she made her fragile and yet brutal lines public. She tore the pain out of her soul – and wrapped it in rap.

I’M THE MASTER WITH THE SHARPEST KNIFE IN TOWN

I GOT YOUR SEX UNDER MY BEAT

BIG FRA GIVES IT TO YOU FRESH

She banned booze and drugs from her life and gave herself another indelible badge, this time in black ink on her right hand: “Clean & Sober”. Since then the young artist has been subtly winding her way in English, German and Spanish through the stormy seas of an ambivalent soul in the throes of courting, conquest and consummation. This is her game and she loves it. Especially since detoxing back to lucidity. 

BABY WE SHOULD BE A POEM IN YOUR BED

MEET ME AT THE BOTTOM OF THAT SWEET SWEET SONG

AND YOUR VOICE PRETTY GIRL LICKS MY HEART

Silva has a hard time explaining herself. Art simply happens, she says. Maybe it says nothing at all. Maybe it’s just a lifestyle, a business, a quest, a path. The fact is: she can’t help it. Ever since she began thinking for herself she’s been painting and making things. This is her attempt to understand the world. “I might be a 33-year-old woman who wants to be 25, if not 20, forever,” she once said. “YOLO forever.” She often describes what she does, as well as herself and the world in general, as “one big joke with plenty of pathos”.

It’s hard to determine whether these eye-catching statements are expressions of belated teenage defiance or unaffected truths enunciated with brutal earnestness. Truths about a lesbian artist in a heteronormative society who’s striving for a life exclusively devoted to art. Who worked for three years at a beverage supplier’s depot in order to come to grips with her life. In order to stay clean, to lead a normal everyday existence, to get far away from art . . . only in order to rediscover it – in the middle of a storm. Who refuses to justify her sexuality, her flirtation with commercialism, or her primitive working methods. Who stands there and says to the world, “Here I am and I have something to say.” And says it loud and clear, in all caps: 

FROM NOW ON THE TREMENDOUS PAIN OF MY SOUL IS GONNA BE THE SUNSHINE ON MY FACE

25 Memoranden
by Francisca Silva

Copyediting & Text: Stephanie Rebonati
Book design: Teo Schifferli
Published by Edition Patrick Frey, 2017
ISBN: 978-3-906803-45-6