Bruno Silva: An Ontology of Impermanence

By Anaïs Castro

2025

 

 

Bruno Silva’s practice unfolds in the space of contradiction. His work grapples with the relentless transformation of bodies and objects, yet it simultaneously strives to arrest this flux, to pin down an elusive instant as though capturing a still image from the perpetual flow of time. Between motion and stasis, he builds a poetics of tension that generates a cascade of dualities that define his artistic language: the living and the inert, the functional and the dysfunctional, the synthetic and the organic. It is in this unsettled zone, where categories erode and overlap, that Silva’s work breathes.

 

Central to his approach is a displacement of materiality itself. Objects are treated as images, while words acquire a sculptural density. A child’s toy, a toothpaste tube, a balloon long since deflated — objects belonging to the realm of use and play returned as debris washed up by the tide that the artist found on the beach. Silva gathers them like fragile testimonies, residue of lives once lived and then abandoned.  The box—at once container, coffin, reliquary—is a recurring actor in this poetics of material. Sometimes left starkly empty, sometimes brimming with improbable cargo, it becomes, in works such as dr cabanès: flor da pele, a theatre for fragments culled from the detritus of everyday life: food scraps, button, and other discarded trinkets. Once placed within Silva’s boxes, these objects no longer serve as refuse; they acquire the aura of relics. The boxes become surrogate bodies, fragile vessels that offer shelter and care to what the world has cast aside—recalling the lineage of the readymade while interrogating contemporary obsessions with preservation, and the uncomfortable inescapability of death.

 

Consumption—whether of food, objects, or images—returns as a persistent question in Silva’s practice. For the artist, it represents a double-edged condition: a necessity of survival that simultaneously exposes the excesses of contemporary existence. He often uses a mixture of glue and talcum powder that evoke gastric juices, the unruly metabolism that binds survival to waste, and renewal to decay. The skin, in this context, emerges as both metaphor and method: a surface that erodes and regenerates, mediating between interior and exterior, body and world, matter and affect. This sensibility extends to his visual processes, where images are transferred through wetness, adhesive layers and fragile translucencies, their textures recalling the porous boundary of flesh—at once barrier and threshold, wound and membrane.

 

Motifs of haunting weave through the work: sleepless eyes that stare without rest in the insomniacs series; Dixie, a ghostlike dog that grows more spectral with each successive layer of glue. These figures seem less representations than apparitions, images that hover between presence and disappearance. Tattooing techniques recur across surfaces and even on gallery walls—as though language itself were an incision inscribed upon space. Language, in fact, is mobilized as matter: words and poetry punctuate his practice, functioning as fragments to be recombined into new constellations of meaning. His ongoing pages de route—a multilingual accumulation of texts, addresses, farewells, and stories—functions as both diary and cartography, situating the work within the itinerant geographies of Silva’s vast practice.

 

The gallery, for Silva, is never neutral backdrop but a co-conspirator. He has exhibited in butcher shops, an old garage shop, spas and other unconventional sites, allowing each location to exert its own gravitational pull, shaping materials, subject matter, and meaning. In Water Marks (Royat), for instance, Silva placed his works among commodities sold in the shop of a thermal spa, collapsing the distinctions between art and commerce while juxtaposing the economy of wellness with the mechanisms of capital exchange.

 

Always shifting between registers—poetic and material, intimate and systemic—Bruno Silva’s practice inhabits a liminal zone between the body and object, preservation and erosion, consumption and survival. At its core lies an attentiveness to cycles of transformation, where all that has been discarded reemerges with new potential, everything and everyone belonging to the same continuum, endlessly circulating through matter. Attuned to this economy of becoming, Silva’s practice becomes less an act of archiving than of alchemy: a transmutation of the overlooked into the luminous, of the perishable into the enduring. Fruit left to desiccate, plastic flowers lifted from graves, or a tooth encased in glass all whisper of mortality, not as an end but as a passage toward renewal. Silva does not offer consolation but lucidity: every fragment, every object, every meaning like every word, remains caught in the liquid current of transformation.