Finissage Weekend
Season XXXIV- Spazio Nobile Gallery & Studiolo
Bela Silva, Solo Show
À perte de vue
Rue Franz Merjay 142 & 169, 1050 Brussels, Belgium
The gallery is open from Tuesday to Friday, 11-18.00 or by appointment
Finissage on Saturday 30 August, 12-16.00, in the presence of the artist
Photo by Barbara De Vuyst
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
Download the Exhibition Catalogue
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.
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.
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 from her artworks.
