Pacifico Silano in "I Won’t Last A Day Without You"
By LINDSAY COSTELLO
Fruit and limbs. Warm light against brief patches of skin. Frames within frames. Sharp leaves slicing into view. Amid this scene, an eye, a shadow of a person. In the background, Diana Ross’s “Upside Down” pipes in: “I know you got charm and appeal/You always play the field/I'm crazy to think you're all mine/As long as the sun continues to shine/There's a place in my heart for you, that's the bottom line.”
Pacifico Silano’s solo exhibition at Melanie Flood Projects, I Won’t Last A Day Without You, consisted of photographic prints, framed without glass and adhered in vinyl to the gallery walls, plus a video, Inside Out. Curated by Yaelle S. Amir, the exhibition’s prints are displayed in several series along the walls, framed works overlapping with vinyl prints to create fluid horizontal movement. The framed prints do not have glass separating them from the viewer, creating intimacy and highlighting the dot matrix texture of each work. The atmosphere created is immersive and overtly sensual, but delicate, never garish or egotistical.
Installation image of I Won’t Last A Day Without You, photo by Area Array, courtesy of Melanie Flood Projects.
Silano pulls source imagery from gay erotica of the late 60s through the late 80s, tracing a path from the Stonewall riots to the peak of the AIDS epidemic. These images from erotica are subtle, mainly pieces of portraits emphasizing eyes, faces, and limbs, alongside which Silano collages natural elements like roses, clouds, a sunset, and a rocky terrain. The artist’s fragmentary and overlapping style creates an inquiry on the qualities of desire in gay culture. His collages soften one’s perspective, draping pink satin over a thirst for pornographic satisfaction. Yet a sense of grief withstands—it’s found in each face, in shadows, in an orange sunset. Silano communicates the unease of this era without saying a word.
The artist’s personal history adds another layer of intensity to the exhibition. Silano was born during the AIDS epidemic to a sex-shop-owning family. His uncle died due to HIV complications, and the death was metaphorically erased from the family record due to stigma. These foundations inspired Silano to create a series of works memorializing those who posed for, and consumed, the images from his source magazines. The tenderness he achieves in I Won’t Last A Day Without You seems to stem, at least in part, from the highly personal nature of the exhibition.
Delicate, Tangerine Dreams, and Yes To Heaven all seem to follow similar trajectories—pairing soft portraits, interior spaces, and objects of lushness and desire—but Lonesome Town and All The Ways To Love A Man depart from the other works in their vastness and open-ended feeling. In Lonesome Town, two rocky landscapes are shown side-by-side in limited perspective, honing in on an expanse that is also restrained and incomplete. The prints hint at overarching anxieties, but without inviting the viewer into the delicate interior space that Silano’s other collages occupy. Installed next to Lonesome Town, All The Ways To Love A Man brings in a cowboyesque figure gazing directly into the camera lens. More exterior plant life is collaged in this image; the figure seems to live within this expanse of Silano’s creation but is still restricted by it.
photos by Area Array, courtesy of Melanie Flood Projects.
𝘠𝘦𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘏𝘦𝘢𝘷𝘦𝘯 (detail), 2020, photo by Area Array, courtesy of Melanie Flood Projects.
𝘈𝘭𝘭 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘞𝘢𝘺𝘴 𝘛𝘰 𝘓𝘰𝘷𝘦 𝘈 𝘔𝘢𝘯, 2020, Archival Pigment Print, 16x20", photo by Area Array, courtesy of Melanie Flood Projects.
The viewer finds political context for Silano’s collages with Inside Out, a film combining clips of Reagan alongside historic footage from gay bars, nightclubs, Pride events, and more. The film plays on a loop in the gallery, with Diana Ross’s “Upside Down” resounding through the space. Inside Out drives home the melancholy-amid-pleasure feeling that echoes in all of Silano’s works, but it also serves as a reminder of how the AIDS epidemic still reverberates today. Through Inside Out, Silano brilliantly illustrates the culture of the time from an outsider’s perspective, while his accompanying prints create layers of depth that challenge our expectations.
Pacifico Silano: I Won’t Last A Day Without You, Melanie Flood Projects, Portland, OR, October 3 — December 5, 2020.
Lindsay Costello is a multimedia artist and art writer living in Portland, Oregon. Her critical writing can be found at Hyperallergic, Art Practical, Art Papers, 60 Inch Center, and Art Discourse, among other places. She is the founder of soft surface, a digital poetry journal and residency, and the co-founder of Critical Viewing, a recurring web and riso-printed publication aggregating contemporary art events in the Pacific Northwest.