If someone were to ask me about the secret recipe that Silvia Grav (Vizcaya, 1993) follows to create her enigmatic photographs, I think that it would be impossible to describe. Even if a person believed that he or she could follow such a recipe to the ‘T’, nevertheless, this imitated artistry would be nothing short of a disaster, as the brilliance and elegance with which the photographer resolves every piece is inimitable. The fog which covers her pieces and the observer, even when watching them through a screen, is a feature of artist’s brilliance.
With a spoonful of reality and some drops of daydream, she combines two worlds which merge in a silent atmosphere in which it seems that we can breathe the deep and durable aura of Walter Benjamin. It is an awe-inspiring approach to that which is ‘unique in appearance or to semblance of distance’. It can only be identified as something we find within the past, which should be hidden and which reminds us of monsters that are arcane and obscure.
The monochrome style of her photographs, accompanied with verses of some of the most disturbing poetry, drags us into the eye of the storm and into the most critical moment of the German expressionism cinema of the 20’s by Fritz Lang or F. W. Murnau. Screams which seem drowned, glances which seem lost, frozen tears and bags, wounds and blood, all suggested within a faint glow. It almost looks as if Grav has found an alarming peace in the Psychosis by Alfred Hitchcock.
That melancholy recipe.
SILVIA GRAV
CURATED BY LAURA JIMÉNEZ IZQUIERDO
The artist’s oneiric universe, along with teaspoonfuls of melancholy, reminds us of disturbing tendencies for romanticism, as seen within the photographs by Francesca Woodman, which the young American artist admitted to hating. Bodies which disappear writhing on blurred shadows; galaxies which go through hearts; shadows which follow the characters in a somehow blurred image. These are images that we have found in the most unusual place, hidden within a trunk of the remote attic of the Rebeca’s mansion in Manderley. Such private devastated spaces, abandoned most of them, take us to a past world where we can breathe dust, an old air, rich with secrets and history. It is curious how everything past, which cannot be returned to, attracts and obsesses us. Grav stresses this aspect of the photography: the melancholy and desire for the impossible of return to life.
'The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become
the most surreal of objects –making it possible as Benjamin said,
to see a new beauty in what is vanishing'.
Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1975.
Silvia Grav is the protagonist of most of her photos and she looks like a poetic ghost, a sweet and intriguing young sickly woman who seems to need help but who wishes solitude. This is not an autobiographical work, but she does collect inspiration from her own life and her circumstances, which are used as subjects to work on to create an image which tells of other things. Through this method of creation, she achieves: drama, mystery and stories of science fiction, as if it is all occurring within a horrifying dream from which we are unsure as to whether we actually want to awake from .
Some of her photographs are titled: “A Dream about the Holocaust”. Her subject matter of inspiration does not revolve around the Nazi Holocaust alone, though she has been attracted and obsessed with it since she was little, but it tells of cruelty and perversion in general. She is fascinated by everything heartless and inexplicable that a human can do. Silvia explains it in that way:
'Everything that I cannot understand follows and obsesses me terribly'.
A dream of sadness, about feeling like Woodman ‘a very old coffee-cup sediment’. An incomprehensible tendency to fatality which gives an air of pain and neglect to the protagonists. A neglect that Gregor Samsa could feel in The Metamorphosis of Kafka. A poor different insect misunderstood by a society which walks without feeling empathy by the one who walks around. And Grav also suffers her own metamorphosis.
We see a shy and insecure young woman laying back on her mattress, curled up and embracing herself next to some scattered rose bush leaves. The strong contrast between the lights and shadows of her skinny back awakens a desire in us to rouse the sorrowful and sleeping beauty. However, once having awoken her, we find ourselves face to face with Daphne, who looks straight at us, already having been dominated by shoots and eaten away by thorns from the rose bush. Behind the mask, she looks at us and, it seems, beyond into the distance, she understands the aura of rejection that she produces and feels the impotence of not being able to change the very core of her nature.
The images are both very Kafkaesque and very Dantesque. Countless influences from both genres are both evident from the brief and frozen vanishings of the futuristic avant-garde of Anton Giulio Bragaglia or the oneiric and conceptual photography of Duane Michals. One can even imagine her posing like any other muse of Picasso in his Parisian attic, as her photographs have the same charm and surrealist elegance of Lee Miller and Dora Mar.
The recipe of Silvia Grav could easily be an accompaniment to a hair-raising horror story narrated on a summer night beside a bonfire. Its beauty and mystery would become stark and impossible to deny alongside melancholic compositions from the accordion, piano or even violin of Yan Tiersen.
Let us remain far away from the kitchen and from trying to imitate her method, as everyone knows, too many cooks can spoil the broth. Let us allow her to cook and continue to fill her images with a vacuum of words, and let us enjoy ourselves as she invites us to enter into her kitchen to sample her wares and drink her rich bitter wine. Let us watch a master chef at work.
Laura Jiménez Izquierdo
April 2016.
Bio:
Silvia Grav (Vizcaya, 1993) has been living during some years in Málaga and Madrid. She studied the high school diploma of arts and she started the Grade in Fine Arts, but she abandoned them, feeling her artistic creation limited. In 2014 is selected as one of the most talented young photographers under 20 years by Flickr in "20under20", exhibiting thanks to that in a collective exhibition in the Milk Gallery of Nueva York, moving to live to Los Ángeles afterwards. She has exhibited individually in the gallery Belaza of Bilbao, the gallery Tache of Barcelona or in the Espacio Líquido of Gijón; and in collective exhibitions in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, in the exhibition 'Femme fatale: del encanto a la perversión' in Málaga, 'Animales' in León, in Malagagorée in Senegal. Nowadays, she lives and works in Los Ángeles.