Blue Lights (Marquee), 2024, oil on canvas, 44 x 25 inches each (diptych)
1) Could you introduce yourself? Where are you from, and where did you study art? When did you first see yourself as an artist?
Hi, my name is Silvia Muleo. I am a visual artist who works between installation, painting, and video, currently based in New York. I was born in Italy where I attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence before moving to New York. I can’t recall a specific moment where I saw myself as an artist, but I always drew a lot as a child and specifically drew from observation as a means of understanding the world around me. After finishing high school I felt that I couldn’t do anything else but pursue this calling therefore I enrolled in the Academy and started taking my artistic inclination seriously.
2) Your paintings cannot be considered photorealism. You use composite photographic references as found in hyperrealism to arrive at a contemporary style of painting that appears realistic but also cannot be termed hyperrealist. They are not hyperrealist because they are lightly detailed with an economy of brushwork (as opposed to the high level of detail and precision that is found in hyperrealism), completed in a single layer, and yet utilize multiple photographic references. You appear to emphasize the abstract nature of the photographic reality at the human scale that people naturally assume to be the base, physical reality. Are these observations and assertions about your art true?
My work is figurative, and it lives in the gap between reality and perception. I don’t concern myself with the challenges of photorealism, I see it as a movement specific to the United States’ late art history, which doesn’t influence my work. I use photography as a tool for research, to collect forms and unique incidents of light, that I can look back on to investigate, in a process of observation that can take months or years. The nature of the reference is different, as opposed to working from life or memory, and it’s up to the artist to either bend to the snapshot aesthetic or impose the memory of their lived experience in the moment of taking a photograph. I’m not as interested in this choice as I am focusing on synthetic spaces, subtle distortions, and models.
You are right when you mention ‘economy of brushstrokes’, that is something that I have been pushing more and more in my work: more often than not my paintings are resolved in one thin layer of pigment. The absence of pigment and the revealing of the surface is what brings light into the work, and it’s just as important as the painted portions of the canvas or linen. Reality is another word that is getting exponentially complex these days, I don’t think two people can agree on the definition of what is ‘real’ anymore. Every time we take a picture we put an invisible filter on an experience: some things make it into the frame and others don’t.
Split-Tilt/Tilt-Split, 2023, oil and oil pastels on canvas, 40 x 30 inches
3) Light appears to be an important part of your work. How do you find clarity of the relationships between light, object, and shadow even as you use composite use of images and photographic references?
Absolutely, the observation of light and its distortions is one of the core elements of my work. Light reveals to our eyes all the things around us, and as diurnal animals that means life. Some religions and cultures pushed it further and associated light with the divine and truth. These associations stay in the language, and language shapes the understanding of the world and logical order of our memory and experience. And yet today we have complete agency on most of the light that surrounds us: artificial light, but it still retains an ancestral control over our bodies, blue lights keep us awake at night, the lighting up of our mobile screens make us turn around and dive in our phones, and light pollution is a big concern for our planet. A question lingers in my work: is todays’ light erasing or revealing?
Installation shot at New Collectors Gallery of 'Whispering in Low Tones; and Let it In" and "Split-Tilt/Tilt-Split"
4) How does light impact the quality of your rendering of the human flesh, as it is found in the fingers of the hand(s) as depicted in your paintings? How do you capture the translucency of the flesh on a technical (or conceptual) level?
In my paintings direct light is absence of paint; silence. I allow the paint to bring unexpected quality in the work, emptiness is one of them. The absence in the work speaks of a sensation of loss: loss of context, loss of a sense of reality, loss of truth, loss of meaning, loss of understanding of multifaceted perspectives.
The weight of this emptiness creates a space between things and people. It's a silence that leaves no room for anything other than itself.
I want from the paint a sensation of unreliability, the figures are never solid enough for the eyes to fully rest on them.
American Heads (2 Halos), 2022, oil on canvas, 24 x 24 inches
5) Why do you focus on the human hand? Is there a story behind or a thought explaining your depictions of the hand(s) and how they reveal themselves within and interact with the light that hits the hand(s)?
For the body of work I recently exhibited at New Collectors gallery, I focused on details of the hand and distortions created by light going through the materials they are holding. The starting point of that specific research was mobile screens and edges. Where does the content of the screen begins and ends? Does it stay in the margins? How do we access it?
We hold these screens with our hands, we manipulate images with the touch of our fingers and it's so easy to make, for example, a picture, or a video, be what we want it to be. Touch, as a sense, is taking over the navigation of synthetic spaces; we don’t need our whole body, if given a screen our hands take us anywhere.
Untitled, 2024, oil on canvas, 30 x 48 inches
6) How does the visual metaphor or allegory of the reflection visualize or represent the world of social media? The nature of the reflection in your work is like a mirror... that offers a meditative glimpse of the other world that is separated from our own in the opposite direction of the spacetime continuum from the beginning that was the Big Bang. It does not appear like the loud, chaotic, and manipulative world of social media. Your work has a thoughtful quality like a Buddhist monk deeply contemplating the enlightened solutions to the earthly problems of the world. It is ethereal, analog, and quantum like light itself, not digital and artificial like social media that is the product of computations, data, and simulations. What do you think?
In literature the synthetic or digital world is often referred to as the ‘mirror world’; the popular tv show ‘black mirror’ uses this analogy to refer to the computer screen. It is true that the mirroring of social media is different from the mirroring of a physical reflective surface, but I wouldn’t be so sure that our brain, at a subconscious level at least, has adapted itself to see a clear difference between the two. The way we believe information on social media is very similar to the way we believe in our reflection in a ventrine. The rational part of our brain might tell us that what we see is not the whole truth, but it surely appeals to every other part of us as such!
Social media works through algorithms, and these algorithms are human-made and they have been written to mirror us in every aspect of our social life. In my opinion, the efficiency of technology lies in subtlety, in substituting our world without being noticed. Successful technology tends to transparency, melting between our own beliefs and desires. I focus on this subtlety by investigating transparencies and distortions that may slip away and become objective truths.
Resonance of Bodies in Geometric Media, video still, 2024, 1:20 min, Sound by Davide Martiello
7) What do you mean by mediation in your artist statement? How does it relate to our experience or understanding of reality?
I use the word mediation to indicate the distortion or filtering of media, in the sense that most of the information that we absorb doesn’t come from our direct experience. The content online is generated by the people that upload it and this mediation can nowadays influence our first hand experience, for example the appearance and beauty of our friends or family, our perception of their happiness, lifestyle or the complexity of their character. Mediation is another aspect of technology that tends to transparency. I was born in 1998 so this is all I’ve known and I love the internet! But love doesn’t have to make us blind or acritical. I’ve seen the mediation and layering of this new world evolve, and many innocent instants become darker.
It’s really important for me to take people outside of synthetic spaces, reorient their sight and leave the viewer with questions instead of constructed truths. To talk about social media outside of it is to allow the viewer to have the distance necessary to ask questions that we don’t want to answer. This obviously is a long life ambition for my work.
Down is Down, video Still, 2024, 0:54 min, Sound by Davide Martiello
8) Is your art really about social media and our experience within it, or is it about something else entirely? What if your painting is the 21st-century age-of-the-social-media equivalent of the Impressionist paintings that first documented modernity in the mid-1800s France? Your paintings are about a world impacted by the rise of social media and smartphones (thanks to Steve Jobs), a world that appears similar to the late 1990s or the early 2000s to any careless eye but is fundamentally changed and different? Aren't you, in a way, documenting how the warm light of the sun (of the physical reality and nature) hits your skin (of your hand) and the retina of your eye, contrasting overwhelmingly with the artificial, electronic signals and blue lights (coming from your smartphones and computers)? You aren't painting about social media directly per se but rather making art about the analog quality of the light and nature that reminds you to escape the endless internet rabbit hole of the Matrix, right?
I work on social media without the use of image collages, chaotic compositions, reproductions of memes etc.. I work on social media by extracting and erasing. I focus on transparency and loss. The Internet can turn into a rabbit hole, and in my experience that means that for how much layer of information, opinions, images, text, video on the other side we have a complete loss of context, direction, orientation, time and sense of self. The structure and formal aspects ( ex: the split screen aesthetic ) of social media and the internet takes direct form on my videos and paintings, they challenge the edge of the traditional (canvas) and contemporary (video) screens.
Full Dilation and Complete Contraction, 2023, oil on canvas, 60 x 153 inches
9) If Marxism was about the alienation of the worker from the products of their labor, is social media about the alienation of the person from physical reality and existence, which can be effectively summarized by the quality of the light that they are immersed in (analog and natural versus digital and artificial blue light)?
I think in our current landscape we can’t consider natural and artificial as a duality in opposition. They are coexisting, the physical world and our mirroring model are informing each other and overflowing in one another. When it comes to social communication, texting on multiple platforms and face-to-face interaction almost becomes indistinguishable: I can’t point at one as more real than the other.
It is true that social media are fighting a war for users' attention, while nature couldn’t care in the slightest, our survival instinct should take care of that. This aspect could resemble the dynamic of a two-player zero-sum game.
I don’t have the date or knowledge to theorize on this yet, time will bring answers.
10) Who are some of your favorite artists, and which artists have impacted your art the most in recent years?
This past year I’ve been most impacted by the artists who I work for. I had the chance to work for very talented people and as much as I don’t want gender to play a part in it, it has been moving at times to work for women. To see, in first person, that this career is doable for women who are not afraid to speak their minds.
11) What are your plans for the future? Where do you see yourself in the next 5 ~ 10 years?
I am in no rush to prove myself. I have something to say with my work and that communication takes precedence over my ego. I will develop my practice through residencies. I hope to travel a lot through them and gain new forming experiences and friends.
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