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.

ventos (mad rose of the winds), metaphorically maps key experiences that have shaped her life and world view. Symbolic and associative, her richly-hued, photo-based paintings epitomize the ways in which joy, pain, suffering, and compassion are personally encoded, and how her personal stories also signify universal human narratives.

The structure and compositional elements of some of Poloto’s works in this series are reminiscent of shrines or 17th century Dutch vanitas paintings, which were intended as a reminder of the transience of life, the futility of pleasure, and the certainty of death. Poloto’s white flower as blood-tinged rose, created with an elegant muted palette and visual lexicon of emblematic elements organized in an irregular framework, is one such example. Its central hazy black and white photograph of a bride and her attendants, surrounded by a disparate selection of images—a female face with sensuous rouged lips, a standing couple with animal heads, a fragment of a web, and a rose behind bars, juxtaposed with irregularly dotted planes—strongly suggests life’s ephemerality and vanity. This is reinforced by closer scrutiny, which reveals that the bride has been shot in her back; the red rose–a symbol of love and sexuality–is imprisoned; and the heads of the couple are obliterated by scribbles in a second image. Consistent with the vanitas theme, the frames of this work suggest the passage of time as well as the impermanence of earthly pleasure.

Underscoring the dark nature of white flower as blood-tinged rose is the fact that aspects of Poloto’s family history are embodied and shrouded within its lexicon of portraits, objects, and abstract elements. She typically works with this methodology to construct her works, choosing grid structures or separate stacked, adjacent, or layered planes. While consistent elements populate the works, the key connective ones are the rose, her personal icon, which represents emotion; thorns, chosen to symbolize instinct; and thread, a representation of intellect. The rose, in its various colors and stages of being, along with the butterfly—which represent birth, death, and transformation–are especially important throughout the three phases of her oeuvre, which correspond with the evolving chapters of Poloto’s life.

By insisting that we uncover and decode the saga she reveals in her work, Poloto insures that we will ultimately remember it. Artist and storyteller Maurice Sendak describes this search for the “Other Story” to be a primary motivation in his tales and pictures. He believes the Other Story—the narrative that is hidden within or held by the picture we see—is what we hold onto and add to the experience art offers. In Poloto’s case, once we are able to decode the meaning of the individual elements of her artworks—such as the spectral branches of thorns, cascading swoop of thread, and blue rose adjacent to the semi-clothed woman in the torn branch born in the rosebush–we also begin to understand that this piece is a self-portrait of the artist as a fully realized woman, complete with the inherent paradoxes that define human experience.

Poloto’s art is also filmic in structure, with nonlinear sequences that enable individual works to operate like passages from larger narratives. Within the filmic sequences she enacts postures that relate to the subconscious or symbolic frames within which the figure performs, at times almost merging so that everything becomes dreamlike. This is exemplified in a cry for more than crazy pink—where the young Silvia, dressed in her bridal communion costume is juxtaposed with an ethereal, floating orange slice-like shape and a subsequent sensuous coral band, punctuated below by the imprisoned red rose. In ashes ashes, we all fall down, she looks back on her life in ways that are reminiscent of Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon, using a play of repetition and variation which is central to both artists’ experiments in narrative. Just as Deren’s protagonist steps through disparate terrains in Meshes, Poloto’s characters here exist in filmstrip-like or grid structures that create a surreal perspective. The young Silvia in ashes ashes stands near the top of a ladder, looking down on her history; with her ancestors far below, their faces obliterated; and a white rose suspended in the liminal space between, the work suggests an “out of body” experience that confronts her fears and desires. The experience of this and other such works is ultimately contemplative, suggesting transcendence.

A fundamental duality expressed in Poloto’s work is the tension between the hopes and dreams of human fulfillment—closeness, union, love, family, sensuality–and the ultimate potential for earthly loss. As a woman, she has experienced that full range of experiences and outcomes. From the abstract aspirations of her nascent self, held in the shelter of optical delusions, and the unfolding landscape of her youth in such works as ring around a rosie, to the fruition of her creative and personal selfhood portrayed in the crazy pink is the crazy pink, a red rose, the cry for more than flower color and inevitable bereavements (the ache, the sorrow, the grief, the tears, the void of the heavens), this corpus also serves as a confessional archive. As viewers, we are fortunate that she has chosen to open and share the stories that fill her personal library of memories and dreams. Significantly, Poloto has also chosen to embed her photographs and paintings in resin, sealing both the beautiful and difficult stories by pressing them like flowers, as though to protect them from the raw pain and loss they embody. The “crazy pink” prevails with intellect and instinct. Her emotions are held by the powerful human drive to survive and thrive at all costs, something Silvia Poloto consistently achieves with personal dignity and aesthetic grace.

to this opinion. Art’s decline—from the personal religion that it was for early modernists, a substitute for traditional religion—to its current status—as hipster tchotchke and corporate-state status symbol—was already the target of critic Jacques Barzun in the 1950s. Great critics, he declared, produce work that is “autobiography enlarged; their opinions are not gathered but felt; the truth is not a work of ratiocination but a secretion from experience.” His statement apparently applies to artists as well, for in his essay, “Why Art Must Be Challenged,” he sounds the clarion: 

Nowadays anything put up for seeing or hearing us only meant to be taken in casually … the Interesting has replaced the Beautiful, the Profound, and the Moving… if modern man’s most sophisticated relation to art is to be casual and humorous, is to resemble the attitude of the vacationer at the fairgrounds, then the conception of Art as an all-important institution, as a supreme activity of man, is quite destroyed… if art has importance, it is because it can shape the minds and emotions.

These remarks, of course, implicitly place a huge burden on the subject of the essay, but Silvia Poloto, a talented and prolific Brazilian-born mixed-media artist, self-taught and inner-directed, is not a product of America’s art higher-education system; she is an artist committed, almost defiantly, to self-expression and emotion. “Nothing could stop me,” she once said, describing her progress from electrical engineer to artist, a personal quest not without its humorous side: after “inventing” welded metal sculptures on her own, for example, she discovered a book on Abstract Expressionist sculptor David Smith.

In a 2008 show entitled Absence/Presence at the now-closed Gallery 415 in San Francisco, she explored the psychology of illness and mortality. Her Crush series paired enlarged photographs of common but unidentified household objects with allegorical titles like “Lust,” “Discord,” “Crave” and “Release’; her Unresolved series, comprising “Power,” Penance,” Worship” and Lies,” employed photos of dolls to investigate religious themes. At the time I wrote:

The new works, generally door-sized, hint at transcendence and transformation, combining the beauty of her painterly color and gesture with the submerged emotional content of the photographic work to suggest an infinite or mystical vision revealing the eternal and the temporal as interpenetrating and complementary. Art critic Terri Cohn writes: “Poloto consistently savors the play between the power of the photographic images she uses, the gestural, abstract ground she paints around them, and the gridded compositional format that holds the two in dialogue with each other.” For the artist, objects and field, figure and ground are equivalent — merely different states of matter.

What I did not elucidate then, four years ago, was Poloto’s plight—with her father recently died, and her husband failing. Poloto, in a recent statement:

Eight months ago I lost my mother.  Four years ago I lost my father. Three years ago I lost my husband. One year ago I lost my best friend. … During this period, my identity as a wife, daughter, mother, and friend shifted and transformed. My identity as both woman and artist expanded

The themes of loss, memory, transformation and transcendence pervade her current assemblage work. If most of the pieces were made with the Triton Museum layout in mind, almost like a site-specific installation, each piece works separately as well, testaments to Poloto’s hard-won skills in painting, photography and sculpture; her unerring gift for color, texture/surface, scale and composition; and her ability to infuse her juxtaposed photographic imagery—a pictorial mode usually employed to communicate ironic detachment and knowingness—with beauty and emotion. The symbolic roses, thorns, webs, rays or threads, cells and holes/wounds, as well as photos of her family and relatives (often taken at religious ceremonies) suggest some contemporary version of Catholicism, but Poloto is, like the early modernists, interested in a kind of personal spirituality and seeking for meaning. She was astonished, on happening on a dictionary of symbols, to find that the objects she had selected intuitively had long cultural histories dating back centuries. Poloto’s written statement is an illuminating guide to the genesis of such personal, autobiographical works as  “The ache, the sorrow, the grief, the tears…,” about Poloto’s family karma; “White flower as blood-tinged rose,” and “The void of the heavens,” about her fraught relationship with her self-sacrificing but narrow-minded mother; “A cry for more than crazy pink,” about her female relatives’ contradictory emotional strength and cultural conformity; “Ring around a rosie,” “Pink dawn, pink white, pink shift, pink Sao Paulo, pink San Francisco,” and “Sacred rose, rose profane,” about finding her way from science to art, despite familial disapproval; “The crazy pink is the crazy pink, the red rose, a cry for more than flower color,” about self-acceptance; “The gaze plumbs infinity, the pink forever escaping it,” about visiting the family home after her parents’ death, re-experiencing the past in the family home after her parent’s death; and “Ashes, ashes, we all fall down” and “Optical Delusions” about the impermanence and illusion of human life. If this description tends to present the works as a kind a private scrapbook of the Poloto clan, that, too, is illusion: even without such notes, the works serve as a universal elegy and celebration for those of us who can, when called to do so, see ourselves as wayfarers, though no longer in conventionally religious terms, not consumerist vacationers. Poloto explains the symbolism of  “The torn branch born in the rosebush”:

My process of working is highly intuitive. The rose has been present in my work for some time, while some of the other symbols have newly emerged. The rose for me, is both soul and female spirit, a celebration of womanhood… I have embraced my roles as woman, artist, mother … expressive and exuberant, unique yet connected.

and enthusiasm of the artist.  From the first work one sees, Silvia begins to share a barrage of ideas and messages that inform and are conveyed in her art.  It is an irresistible excitement of the mind that captures you and makes you realize you are in the presence of not only a dynamic individual, but a profoundly informed artist.

The Triton Museum of Art showcases art and artists of California.  While this parameter surely applies to Silvia Poloto, she and her work transcend any such boundaries.  Silvia’s work is extensively showcased both here and abroad, and there is a reason for such widespread appeal.  It is expressed in the articulate rush of information from the artist, and it informs her work.  Silvia’s art is an expression of the many layers of memory, culture, ideas and ideals that make up the psyche of the artist.  And it is this very psyche that ignites response in peoples here or in Brazil or in Jordan or in any of the many countries in which her works have been shown.  What we and others experience in absorbing Silvia’s message, is that her experiences are our experiences, her memories are our memories, her sense of connection is our sense of connection, and through her art, she is we.  Peel back the layers, metaphorically indicated by her layered images, and we see the connection of all, regardless of locale or origin.

The Triton Museum of Art is pleased to host this exhibition by Silvia Poloto.  Her voice joins ours in this celebration of her work, and in the universality of her message.

Preston Metcalf
Chief Curator
Triton Museum of Art

be constantly working; but, ideas for work can come to her at any time and she loves being able to walk into her adjacent studio when that happens.

On one memorable Sunday afternoon, more than a dozen intrepid art trekkers made their way to her Mission loft.  There we sat around drinking fine wine and nibbling on artisan cheeses, while Silvia held court. Silvia is a great story-teller and her story is both inspiring and moving.  Raised in Brazil, she was born into a family and a society that was not particularly supportive of any artistic ambitions.  For her parents, the academic achievements of her brothers, leading to careers in engineering, were praise-worthy. So, intensely competitive by nature, she focused on academics.  She entered the best engineering schools; became a sales engineer; and went on to get an MBA – all to prove to everyone that she was as good as or better than her brothers.  Becoming an artist was not an option – not even a dream.

Then, love entered the picture and everything changed. Everything became possible.  She met her Irish husband on a beach in Brazil.  After a whirlwind romance, they married.  Billy won the Irish “U.S. green card” lottery and off they went to live in the United States.  Three months after moving here to San Francisco, and without the familial and societal pressures, Silvia decided that she had become an engineer for all the wrong reasons; and she quit.  She took some metal-working classes at City College of San Francisco and started making sculpture.  She actually worked as a welder for a short time. But her art quickly gained traction.  Her art professors recognized her talent and encouraged her.  She got a merit scholarship to the Art Institute, but dropped out quickly because she needed to focus on actually making art to meet the demand. Galleries started representing her.  Art consultants sought her out.  When she stopped making sculpture and turned to painting, they all came along for the ride.  It was, in many ways, a charmed life.  Then, tragically, her husband, who was both her best friend and an important partner in her career, became seriously ill.  In early 2009, she lost him to cancer.  On that visit to her studio, he was omni-present in both a large series of photographs and in a funerary art piece she created.  It has been incredibly challenging, but we all got a sense of just how strong, just how determined Silvia is.

Silvia has worked in sculpture, photography and video, in addition to painting.  And all of these make their way into her artistic process.  With photography and sculpture, the idea usually comes first.  These are what she calls “thinking pieces”.  She has a vision and she sets out to realize the vision in the work.  However, she pointed out that “there is a space of not thinking, even in the thinking pieces”.  With painting, it is more overtly “not thinking”.  Her goal is to allow her sub-conscious to direct the pieces.  The works are not really planned out in advance.  These are what she calls “intuitive pieces”.  They develop naturally.  I asked her a question that I often ask abstract artists:  “How do you know when it is done?”  In her inimitable style, she stated with absolute confidence that “I always know when it is done; it is very clear”.  She realizes that other abstract artists have a hard time knowing when to stop.  They hang paintings on the wall for weeks to be certain that the work does not need something else.  But for her, there is clarity and certainty.  When a work is done, it is done.  In both art and life, she is striding forward confidently.

Personally, I was first drawn to Silvia’s work when I encountered two mixed media pieces featuring pigs.   The pieces were “in progress” at Trillium, a local printer for artists and they were very complex.  Plexiglas boxes had been built and filled with painted panels, sculptural insets and toy pigs.  The works explore the human condition, with the pigs playing the leading role of the humans.  In one of my favorite works:  “Reverence”, the pigs hanging from meat hooks have a certain medieval quality of religiosity.  The works were both engaging and disturbing.  Two of this series of works are in Silvia’s collection and I frequently revisit them.

The “Pigs” series was a progression from an earlier series from 2004, “Unresolved”.  This was the first series where Silvia technically brought together her sculpture, her photography and her painting.  The works here were less ambiguous.  Titles for the works, such as “Betrayal” and “Vows”, were very much descriptive of the subject matter.  With “Pigs”, there was much more room for the viewer to bring their perspective to the work.  Even for Silvia, who lives with the “Pigs” in her bedroom, her evolving experiences have changed the meaning of the works for her, as well.  These are works that do not sit still.  They morph.

I was very pleased to see Silvia return to this kind of artistic exploration when I recently visited her loft.  She is once again working on large assemblages.  This series is aptly titled “Private Puzzles”.  Once again, she has built elaborate frames that combine photographic, painted and sculpted elements.  However, when she started on these new works, her original thought was to print the photographic elements very large on watercolor paper.  This proved to be prohibitively expensive.  So, instead, she printed the images in sections.  She then found herself rearranging the different sections in various combinations.  It is a very physical exploration of the artistic possibilities that allows her to take images that are well-thought out, then combine her abstract sensibilities to move the sections into compositions that are built sub-consciously.

I am particularly fascinated with her work, “Family Tree # 1″.  Here Silvia has explored the “Spanish” side of her family tree – her mother’s family.  The Spanish women were formidable, dominating family life.  At the same time, they were vulnerable to physical domination and abuse by the men.  Silvia takes three separate panels and physically unites them with steel bolts.  Her grandparents and great-grandparents populate the top panel.  The ties bind the middle and subsequent generation, reaching down to Silvia’s oft-repeated and self-identifying rose.  It is serious work.  At the same time, it is humorous work.  There is a particular subject to the work.  And, there is an ambiguity to the work where the viewer can enter it and make it their own.

with willy-nilly scrawls, which flank those circles and hover above them.

This mode of contrasting structure with looseness is a conceit that spans the work, with Poloto counterbalancing geometric forms with graffito-like improvisations, solid shapes with outlines. Pentimenti peek up through the surfaces’ many layers, telegraphing an organicism beneath the flashy surfaces. Sometimes the artist employs resin to impart a gloss to those surfaces; in other pieces she incorporates collaged printed matter. With painterly topographies that are already deeply layered and richly textural, these tactics seem superfluous. The paintings are self-assured on their own and do not require extra bells and whistles.

Chromatically, the works are a riot of supersaturated orange backgrounds, blues, reds, sunflower yellows, and popping accents that would make Josef Albers proud. The white and blue shapes in Observations in Deep Orange #22 sear and sizzle; a raindrop-shaped form in Observations in Red #12 is outlined in a white so intense, it threatens to leave a sunspot afterimage on the retina. Across the work, Poloto displays a predilection for toying with formal elements, dialectically pitting dark, heavy forms against airy scribbles.

There is a willfulness and obsession to these variations on a theme, yet the bold color palette imparts a buoyancy and fizz that keeps the works from devolving into fussiness, which they might assume in more introverted tones. As they are, the paintings integrate form and color into a brash, unified whole.

Poloto’s masterly command of color, gesture and texture; they are sumptuously beautiful improvisations that have come together from the disparate elements filling the artist’s studio through the agency of Poloto’s intuition — her perfect visual pitch.
The mixed-media Observations paintings are brilliantly colored but modulated fields of acrylic paint inhabited by an assortment of visual events: sweeping brushstrokes in black and white, meandering lines, grids of dots, poured squiggles, and scrubbed-in blobs. They are reminiscent of various Abstract Expressionist painters —Miro, Baziotes, Rothko, Motherwell, and Tapies— but this is a synthesis that creates its own world. A variety of marks is presented close up to the picture plane in front of an aqueous, shadowy mass of color, as if floating on waves or emerged from chaos, but drifting slightly; a sense of temporality and change emerges from the sometimes odd and ambiguous shapes, which seem to breathe.

The new Absence/Presence mixed-media works on wood with resin combine Poloto’s painting with the digital work of her two recent conceptual series: Crush, matching allegorical titles (Lust, Discord, Crave, Release) with enlarged photographs of details of common (but unidentified) household objects; and her Unresolved series of color photos based on dolls and props, with their religious-themed tableaus (Power, Penance, Worship, Lies).

The new works, generally door-sized, hint at transcendence and transformation, combining the beauty of her painterly color and gesture with the submerged emotional content of the photographic work to suggest an infinite or mystical vision revealing the eternal and the temporal as interpenetrating and complementary. Art critic Terri Cohn writes: “Poloto consistently savors the play between the power of the photographic images she uses, the gestural, abstract ground she paints around them, and the gridded compositional format that holds the two in dialogue with each other.” For the artist, objects and field, figure and ground are equivalent — merely different states of matter.
Robert Rauschenberg famously said that he wanted to work in the gap between art and life, and many contemporary artists followed his lead — not just in incorporating a miscellany of objects and media in their work, but also demystifying the artistic process from romantic inspiration to open-ended experimentation.

Such an esthetic demands not just a fearless openness to stimuli and ideas, but also the visual imagination and instincts to refine the daily chaos into an ordered esthetic beauty. Poloto, who immigrated to California in 1992 as a young electrical engineer and discovered her knack for visual communication almost by chance, possesses both qualities in abundance. Pursuing her art education independently, she picked up metalworking, painting, video and photographic skills as she needed them —“Nothing could stop me,” she says.  She remembers somewhat wryly, however, that after welding metal sculptures out of creative compulsion, she discovered a book on Abstract Expressionist sculptor David Smith, and in it, her unknown artistic ancestors.
That slight reinvention of the wheel aside, however, Poloto’s career has been extremely successful.

Her sculpture, paintings and assemblages that have been exhibited in France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Egypt, Greece, Bulgaria, Jordan, Romania, China, and the United Arab Emirates as well as the United States in Dallas, Portland, Chicago, Park City, Los Angeles, Seattle, Miami, New York City and, of course, San Francisco. Bay Area venues displaying her work include the DeYoung Museum, where she was an artist in residence, the Italian-American Museum, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Her work resides in eighty corporate collections and more than nine hundred private collections. She has won many prizes and awards and has been featured in many publications. This is her first exhibition with Gallery 415.Dewitt Cheng is an art historian, writer and art critic in the Bay Area

the works in this series are also populated with such consistent elements as bugs, thorn studded branches, red balls, and twisting lines, seemingly emblematic of her husband’s illness.

Both Essence and Wonder are comprised of individual areas that contain these expressions of her visual vocabulary, almost like a glossary of conditions and emotions.  Some of the paintings—Whisper, Essence–have screened-back areas that suggest memory and landscape. The most specific is Embrace, populated by elements like pills, staples, and hair, implying the artist’s acceptance of her current life circumstances.  By contrast, Solace is quieter, with its suggestion of a diamond-floored hallway that opens in to a space of golden light.

Primarily structured as vertical compositions, some of these works—Ebb, Whisper, Void–are structurally suggestive of beds.  Poloto has created this objectness, in part, by arranging her compositions so that many elements rest in foreground space.  Her evocation of beds is replete with allusions to rest, comfort, and warmth, as well as to sleep and dreaming, sex and pain.  The bed as an archetype–described in Adrienne Rich’s poem Rauschenberg’s Bed–is also mute, unable to articulate what it has witnessed, although by its existence bears evidence of those events.

In a related way, Poloto’s associational canvases merge art’s continual conundrums: abstraction and representation, mood and narrative, materiality and subjectivity, order and chaos: the aesthetic awareness of our tenuous existence and shared ordinariness.
Terri Cohn is a writer, curator, and art historian, and contributing editor to Artweek magazine..  She is a faculty member and Graduate Faculty Advisor at the San Francisco Art Institute, and serves as a trustee for the Djerassi Resident Artist Program.

expressive gesture. The result is a body of work characterized by equal amounts of surprise, playfulness and provocation. Her aesthetic choices engage the viewer on a visceral level.

Increasingly, Poloto finds herself incorporating full-blown figurative imagery into the framework of her abstract compositions. Making the leap to representation, Poloto embraces form and symbolism, endowing her work with unexpected meaning and context. The spontaneous word play and flourishes of calligraphy in earlier paintings now give way to unfettered narrative opportunity and interpretation.

The series, Unresolved, melds abstraction and image to surreal effect. Superimposing large-scale images of recognizable objects into the paintings provides fertile ground for storytelling. The work takes on intended and subconscious meanings, from the personal to the political. Each painting challenges and delights with their mix of emotion and humor.

It was three years ago in Brazil that Poloto had a middle-of-the-night revelation  that would ultimately change the way she works. It wasn’t until just this year, however, that she found a way to make the shift to imagery as defining characteristic of her work.

A tattered baby doll belonging to a friend, became the touchstone for change. At once vulnerable and repellent, the doll’s image took hold of the artist’s imagination. Incorporating painting, photography and digital technology, the first painting in the series opened up a gold mine of symbolic content. Thematic threads from one painting to another, creates a lively dialogue between the individual works.

A signal idea informs each painting. In Lies, Poloto pairs the doll with a Pinocchio puppet. In the finished work, Pinocchio appears as an encroaching shadow, looming toward the doll. Is her innocence in peril? Or, is she safe in his shadow? Benign and menacing overtones leave the viewer in suspense.

In Unspoken for example,  a fish out of water finds himself silenced by means of a metal vise clamped onto his mouth. Centered in the stillness of the painting, the naturally silent creature is an ironic target for a free-speech crackdown. Held hostage, his gentle demeanor assumes the dimension of martyrdom.

 Worship refers to the famous Black Madonna — a powerful figure among South America’s faithful. As a child, Poloto found her grandmother ‘s fervor for the saint unnerving. Worship brings the uninitiated artist closer to the surrendering properties of faith. Enshrined in uncertain shadows of smoky grays and deep blacks, the Madonna shines forth as a magical presence imbued with life affirming accents of cerulean blue and bright red.

An instrument of torture points the way to Penance in Poloto’s compressed composition. Density of form and color suggests dank dungeons and secret passageways. A spiked ball-and-chain of medieval manufacture still leaves plenty of room for the pain and the pleasure of self-flagellation and atonement.

Two paintings address the ramifications of love in the 21^st century. Plastic figurines blown up to represent a pair of brides and grooms in separate paintings titled Vows and Promises. Poloto’s nod to gay marriage contemplates larger themes of universal love and intimacy. Huddled together at their respective altars, these same-sex couples, with their backs to the viewer, seek legitimacy in an uncertain world.

The over-scaled spool of thread and button in Couture is a fanciful response to high fashion. The artist cleverly ensconces these lowly tools of couture in a diptych that exalts the utility of these humble sewing necessities.

Cold hard cash comes up against deep, warm, crimson tones in the painting, Power. Squeezed into the red, this bankroll of U.S. currency wields its power for good and for ill. The life-blood of prosperity has its shadow life in the searing red tones of Poloto’s canvas. She reminds us that money may equal power, but at what price?

In Seduction,  a photo-perfect tube of red lipstick stands front and center against a background of bright colors. The siren call of its treacherous allure cannot be ignored. Reminiscent of sixties-style Pop, Poloto’s lipstick comes with a steep price. It is seduction on a global level – from rampant greed to material obsolescence.

A compilation of disparate abstract elements coalesces into an invincible barrier in Betrayal. Solid forms and fence-like elements are meant to repel the enemy, but they cannot ward off a large butcher blade that stabs the canvas, literally, in the back. Violence to the blood stained painting alludes to all manner of treachery.

 Conflict is a timely topic. Within a window-like frame, the artist has inserted a toy soldier to defend the painting’s internal landscape. In his tireless stance of preparedness, he stands ready to take on the enemy day after day without complaint or cynicism. The harsh reality of war need not impinge on his idealistic presence.

Unlike the toy soldier in Conflict, the stolid silver spaceman of Quest journeys far beyond the realm of war-torn lands. Bygone heroes of early space exploration are remembered, but this space pioneer is on a spiritual quest for meaning in the universe. His journey transcends the personal in hopes of discovering cosmic truths.

A large rimmed wheel with metal spokes symbolically points to destiny and fortune in the painting, Fate. Crystal gazing poses unseen consequences as Poloto’s wheel takes a spin into the future. Is it really fate or just wishful thinking?

Exit, signified by a syringe that slashes diagonally across the painting’s red-hot interior, poses an uncomfortable dilemma: A syringe may save a life or take one away. It is associated with drug use and the deadly diseases of HIV and AIDS. One can make a clean exit or not. Poloto’s oversized syringe carries the weight of the world in its balancing act as the central image of a painting that considers the morbidity of no exit.

Deborah Phillips, a longtime editor and reviewer of the visual arts, is currently based in San Francisco. 

elements is indebted to the early explorations of Robert Rauschenberg, the Pop artists, and the media explosion of the mid-twentieth century, all of which opened vast potential for artistic invention and interpretation.  Silvia Poloto, a painter and mixed media artist, is heir to this rich tradition.  An inventive and  prolific artist, she has played with the expansive connotative dynamic between painting and photographic images in her recent series Unresolved.  In this series of fifteen works, Poloto has expanded on her earlier abstract paintings and has retained a consistent palette dominated by primary, neutral, and orange tones.

However, in these new works, she has introduced iconic images that allude to the complex range of human emotions.  Poloto’s methodology and the often sinister tenor of the series was established with the first piece, titled Lies, which features an archival pigment print of a worn wooden doll partially shrouded in satin fabric.  The contrast between the brilliantly lit, impassive toy resting in a suggestive interior, and the spectral, Pinocchio-like shape beside it, evokes a sense of foreboding childhood tales and memories.

Poloto consistently savors the play between the power of the photographic images she uses, the gestural, abstract ground she paints around them, and the gridded compositional format that holds the two in dialogue with each other.  Some works have more ominous implications, like Exit, with its centrally placed image of a syringe, and Betrayal, where the tip of a knife appears to pierce the center of the blood-red canvas.  Other paintings, such as Penance, which is dominated by a medieval mace, and Worship, which features a beatific black Madonna that belonged to Poloto’s grandmother, refer to the influence of her Brazilian-Catholic upbringing.  By contrast Couture is quite free and playful, with its images of a button and a spool of thread interconnected by a fiber that loops from one to the other across the painterly diptych canvas.

With a desire to create works that retain an edge yet embody a greater sense of levity, Poloto painted two pieces that speak of love and  marriage: Promises, which is populated by two elegantly dressed men, and Vows, a pair of bridal gowned women. While these paintings continue the artist’s investigation of relationships, she has since created a more emblematic series where she has used pigs as human surrogates. Oddly enough, the implied predicaments of the small photographic images of plastic swine that populate Commitment, Community, Reverence, and Isolation are even more disturbing than their human counterparts in Poloto’s other works, perhaps because the contrast between their inherent innocence, the situations they represent, and our implied treatment of them is so painfully apparent.  As is characteristic of Poloto’s oeuvre, it may be her candor about such tacit circumstances that evokes our own unresolved feelings about the truth of the human condition.Terri Cohn is a San Francisco based writer, curator and art historian.

Shifting planes of color characterize thematic ideas in the painting, Commitment. The figure of a solitary pig corralled into a pen of baling wire stays put as compositional elements float and change around his sturdy presence. A talisman of certainty in a world of ambiguity, the figure of this hefty pig lends a calm center to the painting.

It is a shy pig that hides his head in Isolation. His pink vulnerability stands out against tougher tones of red, gray and ochre in the painting’s interior. In his self-imposed quarantine he finds solace in the Internet phone clip and gray wire that holds him in the thrall of miracles on the Web. Gorging on digital information, this little piggy needs to unplug and get a life.

Hanging from a triad of butcher hooks, three pigs come to the end of their short predestined journey on earth in Reverence. Grateful for the bounty of their flesh, meat-eaters celebrate the pigs’ demise. Poloto’s vegetarian outlook, however, finds her personal expression in the painting’s foreshadowing tones of blackest caverns and gray, mournful mists.