"The Body Electric," a selection of 9 paintings and 14 works on paper made between 1995 and 2007, surveyed Elizabeth Silver's expressionist-based figuration. The artist places her angular, mostly female figures in spaces more suggestive of emotional states than of architectural interiors. The works offer a succession of energetic, painterly juxtapositions, with textured, scumbled, stained, and dripped color often coexisting in a single canvas.
Four female figures are arranged across a shallow, friezelike space in Untitled # 21 (Eva), 1997. Their faces shift between colorful frontal and shadowy profile views, but the painting s dynamic tension lies in the strong contrast between the high-key yellow ground and the variegated blue-blacks that dominate the mostly silhouetted figures. In Untitled #61 (Jade), 1998, three truncated female nudes float within a nebulous blue field, Here Silver s statically posed figures are animated by sensuously modulated color, with tinted blacks used to distinguish borders.
The artist's charcoal and pastel drawings are ... rhythmic, with welters of spiky lines attacking a form or tattooing an outline in place...Silver's drawings offer some of her most intimate images. Untitled # 47 (Carlos), 1998, portrays a double identity. Silver depicts her sitter first as bundles of loosely brushed color bounded by jagged charcoal lines. Describing the same pose a second time, she subtracts color in favor of collaged overlays of mechanical forms that suffuse her male figure with an unexpected androgynous charm.
"The bodies ache with color. They arch, contort and strain--even though stationary. Motion and vibration charge each canvas. These are intense images...there's bound to be a reaction. Such are the paintings and drawings to be found in "The Body Electric: New American Expressionism" at Art Sites in Riverhead...Each sings with color and is filled with energy.
Ms. Silver's art is linked to the expressionist painters of Germany, Austria and Northern Europe in the pre-World War II era... (although she) doesn't bring current events into her art. Like the early expressionists, she channels the energy she feels, the colors she sees, and the emotions that come from being in the moment of making art.
She always works from live models...so every experience is new and unique...It just grows from there." The vivid colors in Ms. Silver's work are a reflection of what she actually sees, she said. Gazing at bodies rendered in purples, blues, oranges, pinks, yellow and other colors, it becomes apparent Ms. Silver sees the world differently than most
...For Ms. Silver, there is no negative space or edge where the figure separates from the space it physically occupies. The painting or drawing is an integrated whole with all colors commanding the eye with equal power and depth.
Ms. Silver's connection with the pre-war painters is obvious to people living in Europe, and Germans seem to implicitly understand her work, she said. Positive reviews, sales and multiple solo shows in Germany enable her to measure her fan base there.
When each day begins, it's about making art, and the energy that comes from line, color and connecting to the emotions that turn movements by the hand into art.
"I only live in the moment," Ms. Silver said. "For me, it's always, 'Why not?' I work from energy. It's so much fun that I can't wait to get back in my studio to draw or paint some more."
