Luke Silva and I first spoke in 2020 while I was still a student. I was completing my MA in curation at Central Saint Martins, where he was undertaking his BA in Fine Art. Back then, he was focused on developing his early object paintings, and I was drawn to a certain liquidity in his work – partly driven by medium and partly driven by his application of paint – that betrayed a vulnerability that I connected to.
We swapped information, but the project at Saatchi Gallery I’d been invited to curate didn’t allow the involvement of BA students. When we spoke again in 2023, it was thanks to a friend of mine, Nick Rhodes, who recommended that I go and see him in Margate.
In addition to his paintings, which were instantly engaging, Luke was enigmatic. His space was meticulous, with primed canvases standing to attention in neat rows and a collection of small cubed vestibules holding a range of pigment-based watercolours that he’d organised and miniaturised just so. He spoke fluidly and quickly about his work, sometimes stopping to say “sorry,” evidently perturbed at the speed with which his mouth would deliver this information. He needn’t have worried; he always sounded stilted but brilliant. The order of his studio reflected his relationship with his chosen subject – someone driven by the potential of the medium. And he was ambitious with it. His research led him to meld canvas and watercolour, building an unusual surface akin to tempera on wood that would become a large part of his visual language.
We held his first solo exhibition at Sherbet Green, London in April of this year, which followed his first solo showcase at Gerber & Stauffer Fine Arts, Zurich, who represented Luke, in 2023. He was determined that it would be an opportunity to present new developments in several bodies of his work, from the ‘fire paintings’ to the ‘object paintings’ to a new series of prostheses-inspired paintings that centred anxieties he held around the ageing of the body, and a desire to be victorious over it. These varied images were pulled from the internet, phone cameras, films and games. He positioned them as meditations on reality, mediated filters through which to view and analyse the world around him, which, as he told me, he sometimes had a hard time understanding. It was a great honour to work with him, his team and his family on this exhibition, which I had hoped might be the first of many. We had only really just begun.
