Solo show: Silvio Mildo

Silvio Mildo was born in Marseille in 1992. His parents are of Portuguese origin for his father, Armenian for his mother. From childhood, he developed a marked taste for art. However, it was as an autodidact that he became a painter at the age of 22. After disco- vering and exploring graffiti, he freed himself from it to embrace a studio practice nouri- shed by various influences, from abstract expressionism to the COBRA movement, from Pierre Bonnard to Pierre Alechinsky and Robert Combas. «I’m not from any school,» he says. I try to remain free in my approach to painting and not bend to any rules, while keeping in mind the work of my predecessors. »Indeed, for the artist, creation is a matter of energy and movement. Silvio Mildo ap- proaches painting with spontaneity, almost instinctively. Abstract, sometimes primitive, his works capture the outpouring of his thoughts, his memories, his emotions, and offer themselves as a logbook of his intimate life and his moods. «I am the very expression of my person when I paint,» he explains. My canvas is the only place in the world where I have power and absolute freedom of my thoughts and my movements, where nothing comes between them. »This apparent letting go is however the object of a rigorous work of composition. It proceeds from a series of superpositions, accumulations, reframings, and mobilizes a wide range of tools and techniques. Crayon, oil paint, spray, acrylic…: the artist mixes tex- tures and renderings to better experiment with new approaches and “tame chaos”, in his words. The result is an effervescent and exuberant painting, with assumed freedom.Silvio Mildo’s ability to capture the bubbling of life and thought quickly earned him no- tice. In 2017, he first joined the Saltiel gallery in Aix-en-Provence and took part in a series of fairs (Art Elysées, St-Art Strasbourg, Lille Art Up!, etc.). The following year, he was also spotted by the Gallery Jo Yana in Marseille. After having presented him in a group exhi- bition and a duo show, the latter successively devotes two solo shows to him in 2021 and 2022. The artist’s paintings are also exhibited in Tokyo (Between the arts, 2020, Tokyo Nights, 2021 , Tokyo Nights III, 2022) and at the Ground Effect gallery (Paris). In 2022, fol- lowing a competition organized in 2022 by the Moleskine Foundation, he also presents a sketchbook at the Palais de Tokyo.These successes encourage Silvio Mildo to push his taste for challenge and experimenta- tion even further. From 2021, a series of bereavements lead him to delve into his memo- ries and probe his Armenian roots. To reclaim his family history, the artist approaches a motif whose variations he obsessively probes: the apricot. By reinterpreting this emblem of Armenia, he purifies his palette and airs his compositions to channel his impulses and leave ample room for sketching and line. «I decided to paint in a low voice,» he says. The direction he took with the Tsiran (apricot, in Armenian) series also offered him the op- portunity to approach figuration and confront the genre of still life. A way for Silvio Mildo to further explore the territory of painting, to which he has devoted himself entirely.

GLANUM NE DANSE PLUS