Jerald Silva

"Silva’s pictures are much more than still lifes, and not just because their figures are credible. They are charged with psychological tension, the tension between voyeuristic impulse and sentimental attachment, between “objective” distance and the need to touch, even to embrace, no matter what the object of the artist’s gaze. In his layering of images and meanings, Silva is also working on many levels of possession and being possessed. And he is not, and cannot be, coy about this wrenching but enduring emotional state of deflected desire. Rather, in order to create intricate, resonant paintings Silva has almost to confess to his obsessions and his fears. His paintings are as affecting as they are because their ultimate subject is the humanness of the man who made them– and, by example, humanness in general. Silva does not insist on the pre-eminence of his point of view or the tragedy of his every manhood. Rather, he proposes that his point of view, for all the strangeness of the modifications it visits on reality, is typical.The world Jerald Silva paints is as constricted as it is in order to reflect back to him, and us, the very act of apprehending it. We see thereby that it is shaped by the impulses and projections of a control freak, a voyeur, a narcissist, a mild paranoiac– that is to say, it is shaped by neuroses common to us all. Its cozy familiarity and dreamy softness, even sweetness, implies that this slightly fantasized reality is, but for the grace of the god of painting, not simply Silva’s projection, but ours."​

-Peter Frank: editor, Visions Art Quarterly, art critic, L. A. Weekly.