Contemplating the Christian background of her painting, for the church of San Martino, Sofia Silva has created two large vertical canvases, positioned on the right-hand nave. Amidst gravel and the remains of 5th century foundations, two paintings on a white background, titled Arrossire (Blush) and Rosseggiare (Turn red), reach a notable height, resting on the ruins of the Palaeo-Christian church.
The artist has devised the works, reflecting on the theme of purity and innocence. The emotion of blushing is one of the first emotions children consciously perceive, a feeling that is accompanied by sentiments of both candour and shame. The term is often mentioned in sacred texts, with reference to the angels, such as in the Gospels, or elsewhere, for example in the text by Saint Augustine who, of the wedding in Cana, says, “The water saw its God and blushed!”.
In the artist’s poetic interpretation, the painting is disassembled into a grammatical array of elements, in a way analogous to the words of a poem, that can be bound together in a network of meanings, or remain unrelated. The white background takes on a red hue, and the visual connection between the pictorial elements creates an abstract colour temperature, which stands out in the archaeological context. The vertical layout helps to disrupt the narrative of brushstrokes and figures, which in Silva’s art never form tangibly recognisable shapes, but remain suspended in a dimension of lines and drawing, in which each movement seems to originate and recommence from itself every time.
The village of Palazzo Pignano, located in the plains of the countryside around Crema, is subdivided into three hamlets, each with its own soul. Wishing to involve all three hamlets in the operation, beyond purely artistic aspects, the artist organised three events dedicated to contemporary art in three different locations, focused respectively on an introduction on the history of painting, the presence of religion in art after the Second World War, and lastly, a discussion on work by Cristina Campo, a female poet with whom Silva feels a connection.

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Artworks:
01. Sofia Silva, Arrossire, 2024. Mixed media on canvas, 300 x 100 cm.
Pieve di San Martino, Piazzale Chiesa 1, Palazzo Pignano

02. Sofia Silva, Rosseggiare, 2024. Mixed media on canvas, 300 x 100 cm.
Pieve di San Martino, Piazzale Chiesa 1, Palazzo Pignano

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Sofia Silva (Padova, Italy, 1990) lives and works in Padova. She studied at the University IUAV of Venice, graduating in 2012, and later pursued studies in the History of Arts and the Conservation of Artistic Heritage at the University Ca' Foscari. Her painting practice is consistently rooted in a feminine, ephemeral, tender, and painful imaginary. Silva's distinctiveness in the contemporary painting landscape lies in her integration of intimate and personal objects and subjects within the language of analytical painting. The absolute, non-referential, and medium-specific analytic grammar, in which Silva anchors her research, is nuanced by details that hint at biographical and generational data. Alongside her artistic practice, Silva has been writing art-related texts for ten years, published in magazines and catalogues of institutions including La Quadriennale di Roma, Fondation Vincent van Gogh in Arles, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin.