Mobilis in mobile, this was the motto of Julius Verne’s Captain Nemo. Indeed, Contemporary Art is an organism transiting in the asystematic flux of existence; a seismograph of world affairs that deals with the urgencies of society from which it inevitably does not deviate.

In the nineteen-sixties, the inclusion of natural materials in art was a moment of physiological transition. The avant-garde revolution resulted, as a side effect, in the clearing away of all superstructures; a return to basics appears to be the predictable and inevitable outcome of this development. While Anglo-Saxon culture expresses this need through Land Art (think of Richard Long’s solitary walks, which leave paths of flattened grass, or Robert Smithson’s poetic constructions such as the Spiral Jetty on the Great Salt Lake), in Italy there is the ‘Arte Povera’ [literally: Poor Art] movement. Examples include Mario Merz, who piled up branches to construct his igloos, bringing over-domesticated man back to the rules of nature (with his obsession with the Fibonacci progression), and Giuseppe Penone, the man who whispers to trees. In one of Penone’s delicate interventions a cast of his hand clings to a young trunk, impressing his mark upon it and remaining fused there throughout the tree’s long life (which will grow around it in an embrace). In another, his systematic excavation work around the adult tree reveals its essence, the young plant which still sleeps within. This unveiling speaks not of nature as being different from ourselves; instead, it ends up bringing us closer to it, by allowing us to relate to it.

Nowadays, talking about nature is a need which goes far beyond nostalgia or a return to our origins for some artists; they cannot but take a strong stance regarding the problem of safeguarding the planet, something which is more urgent than ever before. Olafur Eliasson, for example, who, on the occasion of the 21st conference on climate change in 2015, transported blocks of ice to the centre of Paris, to show everyone the speed at which ice melts, constantly, without respite, including where it should be eternal. There are also artists like Wolfgang Laib or Ernesto Neto who, like top-class chefs, delight us with the scents and colours of nature — from milk to pollen or spices — through immersive installations which act upon our neurons like Marcel Proust’s madeleine, taking us back to a primordial time with which we have lost touch.

Silvia Canton learns from those who came before her and reworks it in her own personal language by actually inserting nature — specifically a piece of virgin cork — into her paintings. Each time she takes upon herself the task of interpreting it, making it a metaphor for a changing world, or even making it symbolise humanity’s own wish to return to being at one with nature. Cork claimed her attention a couple of years ago. It seduced her with its rough and irregular consistency, with its uniqueness and unpredictability. She wanted to make it hers because she was won over by its indomitable character, by the fact that, inevitably, in deciding to commandeer it and make it part of the painting, she would have to take a few steps back, to give it a space for manoeuvre. This would take the work on roads that she herself was unable to imagine. She chooses it (and confides that in that moment there is a sort of falling in love) and then, of course, she cuts it. She modifies it. Sometimes she paints it, so that it becomes blended into the pictorial material, and at other times she brushes it with resin, so as to preserve as much of the plant residues which cover it as possible (the residues of life). In some cases, she decides to treat it with iron powder and oxidise it, so revealing a hybrid identity, metallic, rusty and unsettling. However, its wild and authentic soul remains intact and discernible. There are also the times when the piece is so perfect, so magnificently already finished in itself, that the artist decides to give the cork priority, to simplify the pictorial narration and to allow Mother Nature herself to speak with her most authentic voice. (Think of a work like Abissi [Abysses], a symphony of transparent, dripping browns which rotate around the cork fragment as if it had been the cork itself which had transmitted movement to the brush).

True nature which actually bursts so violently into a story, real nature, in fact, does not limit itself to giving us an account or a suggestion. Silvia Canton does not just paint landscapes with pieces of landscape, the work she performs is much more complex. This is an essential point. The fusion of the artificial — the painting — with the real — the cork — never aims at mimicry: instead, the artifice becomes permeable to the truth, it abandons itself, allows itself to be penetrated by the piece of reality to the point of identifying with it. The artist’s story, therefore, is never simply a natural one; it reveals a path of consciousness within the nature it conveys; it is an analysis which aims to trace history back to its primordial simplicity and down to every detail of its infinite and inexhaustible metamorphosis. It is evolution from chaos to order. The evolution of our planet and of our own being. When we observe a work like Crisalide [Chrysalis], for example, we cannot help but see a moment from the creation of the Universe in that golden exploding nucleus. Yet that sleeping furrow in the brown earth also holds the humble seed with its secret journey to become a plant. The macro and the micro: millennial history and the second, a fleeting segment of time. The introduction of the object — and thus, in fact, the passage from painting to mixed media — allows Silvia Canton to give further room for her thirst for depth and reality. In addition, the three-dimensional and material nature of the works is not just a way to weld us to the concrete, it is also the pretext for triggering a sophisticated trap for the gaze. It invades our space, takes us by the hand and draws us inside, to the centre of everything.

Silvia Canton’s painting is not easy to classify. The gestural calling which often pushes the work towards the abstract constantly clashes with an apparently unavoidable need for representation. There is always, under the surface, a conflict, a friction, between the primitive pictorial material and the gracious references to the great history of art, between instinct and control, and between feeling and reason. Even before this new series, so strongly rooted around the presence of cork, the flowers of the Liberty style, melting in sinuous curves, and the powerful brushstrokes of abstract expressionism on her canvasses, seemed to achieve an unbelievable harmony. The colour exploded, the material spread over the canvas following the bristles of the brush and then melted and trickled into watery rivulets, almost calming itself as it drizzled away. Later, when the gaze was drawn away from the direction of the brush strokes and allowed to explore the pictorial space in detail, the eye discovered small mountains on which fragile shrubs could be glimpsed, or encountered inflorescence. Alternatively, it discovered the sudden light of a red flame amid the swirling of the blues and the browns (the colours of the earth, sea and sky), almost a vision, one which drew the attention suddenly and became the very centre of the work.

Today, in these works built around cork, it is as if Silvia Canton chooses a different point of balance each time. A focal centre (abstraction, narration, suggestion, reference) which offers us a starting point for an interpretation which always reveals itself slowly, a series of successive realisations and revelations which will never achieve — and should not — complete mastery of the work, always leaving us some of the uncertainty which is so enchanting. Take Il grande pesce [The Big Fish], an emblematic work which could alone explain all the artist’s poetic creations. It is a large painting: a rising tide of gold and earth which seems to want to envelop the viewer in an embrace, an embrace which is both seductive and terrifying at the same time. The title is apparently simple and fits the iconography, but the story taking place on that rectangle, so full of substance and colour, is immense. The fragment of virgin cork which gives the work its title appears as a brown wound in the centre of the work; an open wound, a wound sutured in a hurry after having been disinfected with makeshift materials. Around it, the material is rough, coarse, incised with scratches which suddenly reveal possible plant matter, but from a hostile, aggressive vegetation: a tangle of brambles. They may instead, however, be the tentacles of a sea beast. In fact, although the title seems to direct us to think of the sea, the shades of the palette seem to contradict this; they point to a barren, autumnal undergrowth, where life is dormant and only a few traces remain. Because all of nature, from the earth to the sky and the sea, is a single element dominated by a single soul of immense scope, and Silvia Canton is well aware of this. Il grande pesce is a strong work: tough, complicated and beautiful. Its beauty comes from the primitive simplicity which seems to tell of an as yet unorganised primordial chaos; it can boast of important precursors. One such is the work of Alberto Burri, including Burri’s rough canvas in luminous, iridescent earth. Burri also used cork subtly, brown and leathery like the earth’s cracks, to draw the gaze. Incidentally, fish are a recurring element in Silvia Canton’s work, in part because of their rich religious symbolism. In addition to Il grande pesce, there is the spectacular Mattanza [Tuna Fishing], in which the shape is reconstructed in sections and the death of a small animal is suffused with solemn drama. There is also the gold fish of Amo (an exquisite title, as there is a play on words in those three simple letters which can mean either ‘Hook’ or ‘I Love’). This makes us think of the first fish, the father of all fish, while the red, rusty sea seems to be gushing out from a beating heart. While the works which allude to original chaos remind us of the beginning of nature, the origins of man are brought to us by works like Piccola madre [Little Mother]. In this the cork is encrusted with plant residues to evoke the uterus, an embrace, and the circular movement of its background, which opens into a vortex into which spectators might let themselves fall, reveals the pulsing of a red light like a small heart. The instinctive power with which the artist imbues the action of painting thus does not prevent her sending us some subtle messages, or giving us some more or less explicit homage to the great art of the past. This is shown in the joyful colours of Regina [Queen], in which the circular movement and the choice of reds, turquoises and yellows seem to stage a dance dedicated to Sonia Delaunay. However, there are also situations in which the painting feels the need to become news, to make a statement. In September 2019 the artist decided to take a trip into the woods of Croce D’Aune, in the Belluno Dolomites. Anyone who has ventured into the areas devastated by storm Adrian — the storm which hit Italy in October 2018, flattening millions of trees — is fully aware of the sense of desolation and bewilderment felt when faced with the spectacle of what remains. Those who have had the opportunity to see places, after the hurricane, which they had known before, places where they used to walk, have realised that they have lost all points of reference. These have become the victims of an altered landscape, in which only previously inconceivable, alienating perspectives remained. It is still disconcerting to be faced with those mountains of destroyed and mangled trees, pale as corpses, stacked one on top of the other, as in a macabre game of Shanghai. Looking at these fallen giants, our total insignificance is evident to us. The artist also gazed, tormented, upon this sight. It imprinted an image on her retina she would have preferred to have immediately forgotten. She then returned home and finally picked up the piece of cork that she had been keeping for a while because it was so beautiful, and so powerful! She picked it up and, suddenly, Vaia [the Italian name for storm Adrian] was born; a dynamic, swirling work. The brushstrokes on the canvas sometimes convey a pressing wind, sometimes a broken trunk, a trunk whose years can be read in the concentric circles of the section. The painting rises up in waves which are at the same time both gusts of wind and branches, with the cork planted in its midst like a paladin, a protector. A possible redemption and a desirable rebirth.

Acqua Granda was also created from similar premises, dedicated to another of the places devastated by the fury of an exhausted nature. A vision of sea and land, colliding and fighting in a Venice, symbolised by its cathedral of San Marco, which is now nothing but a memory. It hovers like a ghost ship, now uprooted, whisked away from the world.

If we ask ourselves what the generative nucleus of Silvia Canton’s paintings is, the original matrix from which they are derived, I believe that it can be identified in the need and urgency to externalize important emotional contents that cannot find a different way of being expressed.

Feelings and moods, depicted in their variety, complexity and co-mingling, with various modulations and resonances, are the leitmotif of her work, which the exhibition displays with great effectiveness. A common thread that runs through all of the paintings, connects them to others, and gives her work an unmistakable impression.

This painting is a painting of her soul, even if the visual themes appear mainly inspired by nature and, specifically, by the plant world. Trees, shrubs and grasses create situations in which emotional experiences are reflected. They evoke a tonality of affections, which from time to time are presented as yearning or depression, wishes or hopes, enthusiasm or melancholy.

The style of Silvia Canton is nourished by echoes of Art Nouveau painting and we can also clearly identify the attitudes and motifs of Symbolist imprint. However, every reference is shown in a new, vital and lush way, far from lacking in style. In fact, the Art Nouveau flavor emerges from a profound assimilation of the informal temperament and manifests itself with characteristic and persuasive intonation.

Soft and sinuous lines release movements that are full of energy, create vortexes and whirlwinds, force fields driven by impulse and tension, thrusting, sometimes upwards and sometimes downwards, but mainly folding in on themselves, to wrap and enclose.

The modulation of brushstrokes is configured to define the stylistic figure of the artist and ranges from the controlled, defined signs of winding graphemes to joyful, instinctive gestures. What we witness is a skillful composition of figurative elements, mainly arboreal, from fin de siècle masters, with excerpts from atmospheric, anti-naturalist paintings of the late twentieth-century.

The decisive and expressive characterization of Silvia Canton’s paintings also stems from a marked sense of chromatic contrasts, from the tonal contrasts of pure colours to a light and dark dialectic that imparts a bright and occasionally dramatic intonation. A tension which generates a result of balanced forces, to which the title of one work and that of the entire exhibition allude. It is this carefully managed balance that governs the harmony of the canvas and gives it a coherence and unity this artist has never renounced.

These pictures provide the keys to their reading and suggest how we can approach them. The balanced tension that permeates through them articulates and composes the differences, and rather than dispersing them, distributes them over areas of differing intensity, collecting them at focal points that can be considered genuine poles of attraction for the observer’s gaze. The visitor is, so to speak, taken by the hand, accompanied and guided by the structure of the work itself, which offers a vision whose density is never in contrast with the happy immediacy of the encounter.

From the dark turbines of a hurricane they free themselves in the lights and colours of an aurora borealis and, first overwhelmed, then gently enveloped, they germinate delicate petals. Resilience is the force of life, which recognises weakness to face difficulties and almost magically, regains the ability to challenge adversity, transform pain into courage and confidence to exceed itself and emerge stronger.

Her painting is full of symbolism, which focuses on nature, an immense source of inspiration. Nature gives life and nourishment and Mother Earth is the protector of primary energies and the mother of all life forms. In genesis, the earth is defined as the “raw material” and, from this ancient concept of “mother earth” that creates all life forms, including man, the earth is understood as the source of life, it nourishes us, sustains us and has that incredible ability to transform what is impure into beautiful living creatures – flowers and plants – with unparalleled generosity, even where the existence of any forms of life seems impossible.

A large body of work captures the moment of flowering, a show that wants to be a metaphor and a pretext for expressing thoughts, intense feelings and strong emotions. The figurative element, in this case taken from the natural world, is lost and harmonised in the informal and creates poetic visions. Floating plants or plants at the mercy of events, trees or tendrils with strong roots, bend under pressure, but still find the strength to germinate and bloom. Phytomorphic elements are so delicately and pictorially refined that they become elegant arabesques. (Blossoming series; The tree of Life; The good giant, Roots, Vanity).
We can make out different suggestions. A look is turned towards the Liberty not only to capture the natural element and for the language featured in some of line of strength, sinuous line works, but also for the sense of lightness and for the attention to detail.
Thus, these paintings have an affect for the undeniable beauty of the subjects, the colour combinations taken from a bright palette and the delicacy of the nuances, in addition to their originality. When we observe these these works we also recognise a pictorial inclination to the romantic aesthetics of the sublime, for the way in which the artist stands before nature, immense and infinite, aware of her personal smallness.

It is painting of experimentation and research, in continuous evolution, both for the subjects that are followed and change and renew themselves always looking for new combinations, but also for the pictorial technique. The gestures always remain strong, the incisive and material brushstroke is almost always present, but this is associated with a subtracting action by dripping various substances, through which the canvas can be glimpsed.
Operations that create extraordinary effects of light that seems to emanate from within the picture, elements that melt, lose weight or create fragmented textures.

They are inner works, which softly whisper and speak of feelings, emotions, memories, personal experiences that are freed in gesture, in the work that is sometimes placid and sometimes more tormented.
But in this enchanting microcosm you can see the whole universe.