Another good opportunity to spend next weekend in Lucca. You might book a nice holiday accommodation downtown from Tuscany Holiday Rent and profit, among the events of the ” Settembre Lucchese “ from an extraordinary exhibition, right in the centre of the town.
On Saturday, the 10th September, 2011 . the vernissage of Julio Silva’s paintings is going to take place in Lucca at 6 p.m.. A selection of his works from 19 72 to 2008 is on show here.
The showroom ”marmo|design|luxury”, located in Lucca, piazza XX Settembre, 2 will be hosting the French- Argentinian artist, up to September the 30th.
A fil rouge links the artist to the spot. Matteo Antonioli, Roberto Mosti, the owners of the showroom, and Julio Silva jointly share the same passion for marble. They both know its long journey from the mountains to the workshop and the hard work upon it until the final shape when the idea is fixed in it.
In spite of the different points of view, the designer and the artist live and dialogue on marble as a living object, aiming at beauty .
On the occasion, Silva has abandoned the solitude of the castles ( Malaspina, Malgrate, Pontremoli, in Massa) as his ordinary exhibition sites, to land to Lucca, a more urban location. Yet, he has gone on with his passion and dialogue.
It was marble, Silva’s great passion that urged him to the the Apuan Alps, from Paris to his buen retiro in Torano , Carrara, a small village of quarrymen, hidden among the mountains.
Silva is somewhat reserved. No celebrities there, unlike Pietrasanta where the arch- artists ( Botero and Mitorai just to mention some of them) live, even if France has already crowned him among great artists. In 1973 Silva was commissioned Alice au Pays du Marbre at Villeurbanne, Rhone, in 1977 Madame Lune for the Esplanade de La Defence and in 1979 the monumental group Pyègemalion for the Forum des Halles, Paris. Not only sculpture. Sculpturing comes from drawing, the original source of Silva ‘s works. He has approached marble as a painter, who constantly wonders what is on the other side of the image. The two-dimensional perspective comes, according to his own words, from his daily habit to drawing. Single movements, no adjustments. The spring is the vital impulse, the direct magnetism from the unconscious which urges him beyond any reflections. He is able to pass by the controllers of the Ego, to avoid the controls of what Silva calls the cultural automatisms in the interview “All’insegna del navalestro dei sogni, 1979” with Saul Yurkievich, literary critic and professor at the Paris Vincennes University. Silva, student in Argentina of the surrealistic painter Juan Batlle Planas, has been able to soften his first cultural background into a visionary realism, a way of going beyond the European academic surrealism on his coming to Paris from Buenos Aires in 1955. In Paris, the year 1967 marks a turning point in his personal growth. He starts a strong intellectual brotherhood with the Argentinian writer, Julio Cortàzar , who publishes that same year ” La vuelta al dìa en ochanta mundos ” a work defying any genre definition. It is a collection of poems, short stories and reflections on literature, Paris , jazz and even cats. 
The drawings accompanying the writings both illustrate the texts and engender further meanings at the same time. Julio Silva is, here, the graphic planner. We are taken into Cortàzar’s world, made up of many cronopios , idealistic, unconventional and libertarian creatures, according to his type classification. We meet musicians such as Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong, Thelonius Monk and artists such as Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp and Julio Silva himself, to whom Cortàzar devotes affectionate pages in” Un Julio habla de otro. The adventures of Julio Pincel (brush) and Julio Pluma (pen) according to the definition of Saul Yurkievich
( Point of Contact, Syracuse University fall- winter, 1994) go on with another book Silvalandia . They feel like- as Silva loves saying – two acrobats, hanging at the brush stroke and at the pen mark respectively. In this collection of paintings and stories, Silva draws and Cortazar translates the images into stories.
The imaginary characters such as Gustavo the octopus, the sphinx or the Ontok family are- as Cortazar says- forms, colours, movements. Sometimes they speak, they let themselves be looked at, they are blue, white and they enjoy themselves They accept, without any opposition, the actions our imagination suggests, living, on their own, a green, yellow and violet and secret life.Silva speaks about Cortàzar’s happy culture, about his personal pace, tasteful and joyous with which he crossed our time. Cortàzar is now buried in Paris Montparnasse cemetery, under the shadow of two small smiling blue characters from Silvalandia, Silva’s last stone gift.
