Nacho Martín Silva

Madrid, Spain

@nacho_martinsilva

portrait

Bio

Nacho Martín Silva has a degree in Fine Arts by the Complutense University of Madrid. Among his recent projects are Historia pintada de la historia de la Historia at CAB, Burgos, in 2024, Paraísos de Papel at Max Estrella Gallery in Madrid, Extraño Paraíso at El Apartamento Gallery in La Habana in 2023, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, showed by El Apartamento gallery at Liste Art Fair Basel in 2022 or Piece of Trash at Fundación Miró in Palma in 2019 among others.

Photo: Marwin Sánchez.
Courtesy of Galería El Apartamento.

Statement

The way Nacho Martín Silva approaches painting constitutes a stance in itself. It is a song to freedom and a call to distrust. Everything that presents itself as beyond doubt should, at the very least, arouse suspicion in us. Any attempt to homogenize identities must encounter resistance. These two ideas, which when read here may seem almost pamphleteering, in Martín Silva’s artistic practice move close to the ground, appearing and disappearing within the framework constructed by his painting.

“Martín Silva neither illustrates ideas nor has he devoted himself to ‘portraying’ catastrophes with morbid, iconoclastic delectation. His arguments stem from the problematization of images through their heterogeneous and ever-changing treatment (different codes, painting in transit), from rejecting what appears evident before the viewer’s eyes, from restructuring the logical order of images, and from the disintegration of their elements. Of course, all of this could have been done digitally, but then one might ask whether we are still capable of perceiving the qualitative difference involved in confronting a mental process whose tangible materialization says as much as, or more than, its iconic dimension.”

This excerpt from the critique written by Víctor Zarza on Carcoma en la madera, the painter’s solo exhibition at the Max Estrella gallery, clearly underscores the artist’s concerns.

Limited Edition Print

Piece of Trash 5
Piece of Trash 5 42×54.62 cm
Edition of 25
Limited Edition Print €340,00
Buy this Limited Edition Print €340

The artist's process

Understanding the method behind the work is fundamental in grasping the significance of the latter. The work method was founded on a succession of ordered steps that followed an unforeseeable course.

During the first stage, the artist took two small collages as a model (21 × 14 cm) and made a painting of each of them. He then recorded them photographically. The resulting enlarged developed prints and the archive images used for the two initial small collages served as material to make the first two collages in this series. When these collages were finished, the two previous paintings were destroyed with a chemical solvent and the damaged outcomes were photographically recorded.

During the second stage, a third collage was made using the large photographic prints of the initial two collages and the photographs of the solvent-damaged paintings. A photograph was taken of this third collage, and the print of it and leftover printed material from the previous collages served to make the next work in the series. The photograph of the latter was used with any leftovers from previous works to make the next one, and so on, in a process whose end is only dependent on the total disappearance of all the leftovers used as raw materials for each new collage.

Piece of Trash is a eulogy to leftovers and to the equivocal as opposed to the unequivocal.

"Every work of art has a context that generated it, a context that isn't always visible. In this case, accessing the entire series reveals key aspects of the process and allows for a direct visual and artistic association with the series' concept. However, in Piece of Trash, each work carries its own layers of information, in addition to the layers of information from the collages that preceded it. These individual pieces raise reflections on the construction and deconstruction of historical narratives through the fragmentation and subsequent reconstruction of images. "

Nacho Martín Silva

The Piece of Trash Series

This series were first exhibited in a solo show at
Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró, Mallorca.
June - September, 2019

Nacho Martín Silva won the Pilar Juncosa i Sotheby's Prize for Artistic Creation in 2017 and held a research residency at the Casa de Velázquez. His paintings and collages represents in a unique way the New Wave of Collage through museums, foundations, international fairs. Piece of Trash was first shown at the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró in Palma in 2019.

Nº1
Collage.
200 x 150 cm.
2016

Nº2
Collage.
200 x 150 cm.
2016

This series doesn’t treat collage as the sketch or study for a painting, which becomes the “real” artwork. He flips this idea making the painting just a part of the process, but not the final thing.The paintings are made specifically to be photographed and then destroyed. What's left is a photographic record of them dissolving, recycled into the next collage in the chain. Painting stops being the destination and becomes raw material, closer to a plank of wood than a finished picture.
That process puts the series in curious company at that particular foundation. Miró spent the years after 1927 pursuing something somehow similar. He called it wanting to assassinate painting, and answered the impulse by gluing sandpaper, tar paper, and wire onto canvas, then cutting jagged holes straight through his own collages. Martín Silva's chain of destroyed paintings and cannibalized collages sits in that lineage: a documented killing of one medium to feed the other.

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Nº3
Collage.
200 x 150 cm.
2016

Nº4
Collage.
200 x 150 cm.
2016

Nº5
Collage.
200 x 150 cm.
2016

Nº6
Collage.
200 x 150 cm.
2016

"Starting with photographic documentation of the result of a physical action like painting allows me to explore the idea of ​​trompe l'oeil, referring more to the process itself than to the space. It raises a reflection on the idea of ​​fiction and alters the hierarchies of representation. "

Nacho Martín Silva

Nº7
Collage.
200 x 150 cm.
2016

Nº8
Collage.
200 x 150 cm.
2016

Nº9
Collage.
200 x 150 cm.
2016

Nº10
Collage.
200 x 150 cm.
2016

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"I like to suspend that moment of legibility in an image. Because that’s the moment when the image is just an image and no longer a transparent conduit to something else."

John Stezaker
In conversation with
Immi at Knotnorious
2016