Represented Artist Bela Silva
Highlights of Five Sculptures
Out of sight
Africa, vast and majestic.
With its immense plains stretching across the savannah.
So vast, with its grandiose dimensions.
As far as the eye can see, my loves,
As far as the eye can see, my family, my friends,
As far as the eye can see, the cities where I have lived,
Out of sight the countries I have visited and lived in,
Out of sight has been and is a constant in my life.
Everything I know and love lies on the horizon, out of sight.
– Bela Silva, June 2025
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Spazio Nobile Gallery & Studiolo
Season XXXIV – Bela Silva, Solo Show, À perte de vue
Rue Franz Merjay, 142 & 169 – 1050 Brussels
Spazio Nobile is open until Saturday 19 July 2025
The exhibition will reopen after our Holiday Break on Tuesday 26 until Saturday 30 August
From Tuesday until Saturday from 11-18.00 and by appointment
Request the catalogue & contact us: [email protected]
Bela Silva
As far as the eye can see
On the occasion of this second solo exhibition at Spazio Nobile, parallel to other group and extramuros exhibitions organised by the gallery, the painter, sculptor and ceramist explores the magic of the African earth. Bela Silva models it like a world without borders, where sculpture and drawing become narrative, and where emotion is conveyed through texture, scale and rhythm. A horizon line, her universe, evokes a freedom of gesture, movement and imagination, as far as the eye can see.
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“Sculpture brings my drawings to life in three dimensions” – Bela Silva
After studying at the School of Fine Arts in Porto and Lisbon in Portugal, as well as at Ar.Co, at Norwich Fine Arts in England and the Art Institute of Chicago in the United States, Bela Silva is now an internationally renowned visual artist. She has been making her mark on the contemporary decorative and fine arts scene for over 35 years, challenging scale and aesthetic boundaries. She now lives between Lisbon, her hometown, Brussels and Paris.
Bela Silva, Star, Sun, Moon, Sculpture, 2025, Stoneware with underglaze painting and transparent overglaze, ø 62 x 72 cm, Unique piece, signed by the artist
Décor in question
Fascinated by archaeology since the adolescence, her lively sculptures and paintings are born of a free and instinctive gesture, which could evoke the same magic and mystery as the paintings found in ancestral caves or prehistoric artefacts. “The decorative element or object has absolutely no pejorative connotation for me. In an ornamental detail discovered during my cultural travels, I can draw on the sophistication and symbolism of colour, as Michel Pastoureau evokes in his writings,” emphasises Bela Silva. “Art is immersive and it has saved me, reconnected me to the world and given me the oxygen to create. A painting such as Breughel’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, exhibited at the National Museum of Ancient Art, has been a real source of inspiration.”
Bela Silva, Papillons de nuit, Sculpture, 2025, Stoneware with underglaze painting and transparent overglaze, ø 69 x 81 cm, Unique piece, signed by the artist
Photo Barbara de Vuyst, Courtesy of the Artist & Spazio Nobile
Bold stripes and patterns
After her recent travels to Mexico, Brazil, Egypt and, more recently, Kenya, her drawings and sculptures suggest even more strongly this feeling of being: As far as the eye can see. The chromatic palette and the twirling dance of her brush are constantly renewed, at the source of being, like a breath, a dance, a trance. It is not enough for her to visit a museum or read a book: the artist seeks experience in the field, in order to give life and form to a lived experience and a true transhumance. This new body of work is inspired by colourful striped and patterned textiles and their bold combinations, as well as the elaborate and sophisticated jewellery and headdresses of the Maasai people she encountered on her last trip to Africa.
Bela Silva, Moments of Ecstasy, Sculpture, 2025, Stoneware with underglaze painting and transparent overglaze, ø 43 x 56 cm, Unique piece, signed by the artist
The Grid and the Horizon
Through this sensory and chromatic immersion, Bela Silva continues her exploration of a world without borders, where the line is a beautiful escape – an ‘endless line’, like a vital force that runs through her artworks. Ceramics thus become a living ‘earth’, sometimes sculpted into volutes, horns, and interlacing patterns, sometimes into more graphic and geometric motifs, painted in an underlying manner, glazed transparently or with beautiful coloured enamels. The organic forms, half-plant, half-animal, seem to emerge from the earth and rise towards the sky. Here and there, the desert roads of the Masai Mara mingle with the vertical and horizontal grid of American cities such as Chicago and New York, where Bela Silva lived for several years.
Bela Silva, Bouffée d’air, Sculpture, 2025, Stoneware with underglaze painting and transparent overglaze, ø 62 x 52 cm, Unique piece, signed by the artist
A Geology of Being
Nourished by her Portuguese roots, Bela Silva, who studied and lived in the United States and now lives mainly between Lisbon and Brussels, has constructed an intimate geography where the influences of world cultures meet. Her artworks, sometimes monumental, sometimes more restrained and highly sophisticated, defy gravity while celebrating the sensuality of gesture and imperfection, hallmarks of humanity and impermanence. “Sculpture brings my drawings to life in three dimensions,” the artist emphasises. In addition, a sense of incompleteness remains at the heart of her work, for which there is no beginning and no end, but rather a life envisaged as an eternal renewal.
Bela Silva, Tea Under The Trees, Sculpture, 2025, Stoneware with underglaze painting and transparent overglaze, ø 54 x 32 cm, Unique piece, signed by the artist
The Color of Light
As far as the eye can see, her gaze traces invisible paths that connect here and elsewhere, earth and sky, mineral and plant, self and world. Living memory thus springs forth like a fountain of youth, like a mirror that interrupts the passing of time. Life thus takes on a taste of eternity and shared joy, opening up to a perpetual cycle that will never cease to be… as far as the eye can see: an ocean, a desert or an infinite horizon, a line where time and space become as fluid as colour and light.
More than an exhibition, À perte de vue is an invitation to abandon all linear logic and let oneself be carried away into a constantly expanding world, where the imagination flourishes freely, where each work is a stopover in a sensory and poetic universe.
It is a whirlwind of scents and fleeting visions, fragments of memories that emerge in the beauty of twenty-five drawings and five sculptures.
Viewing Room on Artsy
Inquiries: [email protected]
Bela Silva in her atelier rue des Minimes in Brussels, surrounded by her collage, glazed stoneware sculptures and terracottas in progress. All Photos by Barbara de Vuyst, Courtesy of the Artist & Spazio Nobile
