Signals
Fabrícia Jordão e Sanzia Pinheiro Barbosa
The works presented in this exhibition are a small fragment of Falves Silva’s vast, complex and intense production. With a marked narrative trend, with geometrical shapes as well as with images and texts borrowed from the various kinds of printed materials, Falves Silva starts his trajectory fully integrated to the innovations of culture and mass communication in the 1960s: press, cinema, TV, comics are essential to his production. Manipulating elements and images of art history and mass communication, the artist produces artist books, visual poetry, postcards, drawings, diversifying the approach and treatment of the materials he chose.
In a more specific way, in case a genealogy was to be traced, Falves Silva’s production could be perceived as a convergence of two of the main axles of the Brazilian Art: the concrete movements and the conceptual art.
On one hand his production is yet in an intense dialogue with an idea of Brazilian modernity expressed in the proposals of the concrete, neo-concrete and poem-process – from Oswald de Andrade to Décio Pignatári and the Campos Brothers, from Wlademir Dias-Pino, Álvaro de Sá to Moacy Cirne. It’s worth highlighting that the artist not only participated in the inaugural exhibition of the poem-process (1967) but also maintained an intense dialogue with Moacy Cirne, Wlademir Dias-Pino and Álvaro de Sá.
On the other hand, his production is undeniably linked to contemporary art, specifically due to his connection with conceptual art. His activities in the international postal art network in the 1960s and 70s allowed not only the repositioning and insertion of his production in a decentralized and simultaneous vanguard but also the creation of alternatives to the institutional space and an intense and fruitful dialogue with artists of different generations and nationalities, among which Jota Medeiros, Ivald Granato, Leonhard Frank Duch, Paulo Bruscky, Hudinilson Jr, Clemente Padín, Edgardo Antonio Vigo, Ulises Carrión and Horácio Zabala.
Typographer and printer since his teenage years, very early he started a close relation with paper, elected the only material with which he produces his drawings, poems and collages converting this element in a kind of presence and identity of his own creativity.
The series Sinais, formed by more than 40 visual poems, while evoking collage as a latent issue in his production, for its emphasis in the geometrical shapes and narratives, echoes the dialogue with concrete movement and the poem-process. In it it’s possible to identify a recurrent vocabulary in the artist’s production: the square, the circle, the line and the triangle. From these four basic elements, Falves Silva surprises with a combinatory logic marked by the dynamism of the shapes and colors culminating in visual poems that supply, simultaneously, multiple and endless possibilities of arrangements without losing the unit of the whole. With a constructivist background, the geometrical shapes and patterns reorganized and recombined in different colors are the origin of a multiplicity of visual poems in which is noted a logic that, if on one hand, is clearly linked to our constructivist tradition at the same time updates it with peculiar formal solutions. This ability points to the artist’s own trajectory, marked by an incessant updating, reinvention and reconstruction of a poetic project that never loses its coherence.