“Silvia Poloto: Fingerprint of a Spirit” Essay by Richard Speer copyright 2022
Silvia Poloto’s extraordinary mixed-media paintings span a broad range of subject matter, technique, materials, and style, yet they’re instantly recognizable as her own. Upon entering an exhibition, one glances at the wall and instinctively knows a Poloto is a Poloto. Why is that? Alternately sumptuous and austere, abstract and representational, her works have delighted collectors throughout the United States and abroad with their jubilant interplay of line, form, color, and concept. Intensely introspective, restlessly innovative, she has made a mission of exploring the human condition in all its ecstasies and sadnesses, giving herself completely to the moment of creation.
As a critic who has followed her career for the better part of two decades, I see common threads uniting her diverse output, rippling outward from her defining artistic fingerprint: a defiant joie de vivre. Her use of line is extremely distinctive: squiggles and loops sometimes converging into sunbursts or rosettes. Those lines may converge into handwritten text, communicating playfulness or poignancy. Among her forms are signature motifs: the oval, the circle, the amoeba, relating to one another in jaunty asymmetry. There is a potent demarcation of space, of organizing quadrants to telegraph the order underlying even the most free-formcompositions. The works’ myriad layers lend a 3D presence that harkens to her early work as a sculptor.
She is a dynamo in the studio, juxtaposing geometry and gesture, pitting one texture against the next, the reflective and the matte, the opulent and the stark. She is a fearless colorist, by turns uproarious and introspective. In her work I see echoes of Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Antoni Tàpies, and Pat Steir. Her sensibility is a virtuosic coming-together of intuitive forms and architectonic structure. She invites the discerning eye into her creative maelstrom. Viewers see her deconstructions and reconstructions trading places with abandon, allowing them to experience a semblance of what it must’ve been like to create the piece. The technique itself is extravagantly generous; this is an art of complexity, sensuality, and optimism.
In a sense, Poloto comes from everywhere and nowhere. She lives in California but was born in Brazil, her grandparents having immigrated from Italy and Spain. Her background, therefore, is more Mediterranean than Latin American. Her late husband was from Ireland. In the early 1990s, the two of them moved from Brazil to San Francisco. Her intention was to learn English and work as an electrical engineer, but instead she discovered within herself a previously untapped gift for art, a seemingly innate capacity and vision which did not need so much to be nurtured as simply set free to flourish and flow. She began forging large sculptures of welded steel, which married a high-modernist earnestness with a touch of whimsy, walking the line between abstract and biomorphic forms. The sculptures were an important step in her evolution, given that as a younger person, she’d had no exposure to the aesthetic realm. In the U.S., far away from everything familiar to her, liberated by the geographical and psychological distance from the world of her past, she was empowered to look inside herself and unveil the essence of who she was. Although she eventually moved into 2D work, developing the style that became her calling card, aspects of her sculptures’ gestalt have lingered.
Although she radiates a tremendous vibrancy, charisma, and passion, Poloto is no stranger to tragedy and challenge. In a period of only a few years, she lost her husband, father, mother, and best friend. Her husband’s death left her to raise their son as a single mother, a process enormously difficult but also rewarding, and which influenced all aspects of her being, her art-making included. In 2012, forced to vacate her Mission District loft, she took a leap of faith and bought a derelict warehouse in the then-unfashionable Bayview neighborhood and transformed it into a stylish, design-forward live/work showcase. The project serves as a testament to her tenacity and zest for life in the face of adversity—an effervescence that comes through in all aspects of her self-expression, including the elegant, dramatic clothing she wears as an extension of her inner exuberance, values, and authenticity.
Resolutely intuitive, her work emerges from a core of silence and stillness, manifesting in an explosion of improvisation. Earlier work tended to be more explicitly autobiographical, such as Mad Rose of the Winds, a meditation on heritage and gender enriched by her deeply poetical and personal writing. Other series such as Crush and Wabi-Sabi revel in the purity of composition, chroma, and surface. The Wabi-Sabi paintings have been in several solo exhibitions, one of which I saw in late 2021 in San Francisco’s Bank of America Building, a grand space for which Pietro Belluschi was consulting designer. I was struck by how effortlessly the paintings filled the soaring lobby, dialoguing with one another and with architectural space.
The series is one of Poloto’s most minimalist, yet as always with her work, there was no mistaking the style as anyone’s other than hers. One of her newest bodies of work, entitled SIRENS, SAINTS, and SINNERS, is a return to figuration in the lineage of her earlier 100 Women and Old Story/New Story series. In this suite of haunting female portraits, she leaves the subjects’ facial details undefined, the open visages speaking to the universality of what Goethe called The Eternal Feminine. They possess a mysterious quality, the suggestion of melancholy but also strength, an enigma inviting viewers to project their own emotions and stories onto the faces’ tabulae rasae.
Across her multifaceted output, Silvia Poloto’s unique style shines through, her quest for self-expression a conduit for our own. An irrepressible ebullience, born of resilience, animates her every painting. This is not only the fingerprint of a prolific painter, but also the fingerprint of a singularly buoyant spirit.
—Richard Speer is an American art critic, author, and curator whose essays and reviews have appeared in ARTnews, Art Papers, ArtPulse, Art Ltd., Visual Art Source, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, Salon, and Newsweek. He is the author of two-dozen books and has written about many of the leading artists of our time. He has curated exhibitions up and down the West Coast, among them the forthcoming “Sam Francis and Japan: Emptiness Overflowing” (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, April-July 2023). For more information, please visit www.richardspeer.com.