Rick Silva

Rick Silva

Work from En plein air.

“Silva’s “En plein air” is an ultimately logical endeavor considering the artist’s mariage of natural and technological material and imagery in his practice. Here Silva is producing computer based works on location – in the open air – in the tradition of the impressionists. We are offered a prolific output of images offering a glimpse at the artist’s perspective as communicated through the manipulation of software. In many ways the animated gifs and still images produced by Silva are documentation – an attempt to capture and digitize nature.” – Ben Fino-Radin for Rhizome.

and a quote from a recent interview with Silva w/ USED Magazine

“…it is a reference to that painting style. Taking a computer outdoors, using 3D software to create the images, and posting those images on a website is like an updated version of En plein air. Of course, making art outside has a history that goes back thousands of years, but the term En plein air has some specific connotations that I like. One is that it is often associated with the Impressionist painters, and a common technique of theirs was to work with the materiality of paint, to let it smear and pile up so that it looks simultaneously like a summer landscape and globs of paint. On enpleinair.org I let the digital processes show by including the rendering artifacts and polygon glitches…” – Rick Silva