Rear Window
Some notes on Sancho Silva’s work
by Filipa Ramos, 2006

You don’t see Sancho Silva’s works: they are not made to be observed but to make you see other things.

The Portuguese artist Sancho Silva (Lisbon, 1973) has had an odd education for someone in the art world, with qualifications in Pure Mathematics (BA) and Philosophy of Language and of Consciousness (MA). His studies didn’t go to waste, his work redolent of space, time and perception.

Sancho’s creations are delicately balanced between rationality, calculation and abstraction, transposing these elements onto works that challenge our knowledge and perception of the space we move in.

Both Atractor (1999) and Captor (2003) reflect this. In the former, a tunnel connects a door to a window located on the opposite side of the room. There are two seemingly opposite ways to experience Atractor: either by getting inside the new area created by the plywood tunnel, thus being trapped inside a claustrophobic space that leads to a locked source of light, or entering a room from the other side, where it is possible to see the outside of the tunnel without experiencing its contents. Both ways lead to a fragmentary view of the work and reflect such opposing forces as inside/outside, seeing/being seen, looking inside/looking outside, hiding/showing. In mathematics, a binomial is an algebraic expression of the sum or the difference of two terms. Sancho gives form and sense to this concept.

The other work, Captor, is even more cage-like: in the Pinksummer Gallery in Genoa, Silva created a plywood, cone-shaped tunnel ending in a glass capsule. The entrance of the tunnel could only be reached from the gallery’s office, whereas access to the gallery was only possible through a different door. Captor divided the space in two: arriving at the gallery from one door, the viewer saw the tunnel with the capsule facing the room but couldn’t get inside it; arriving from within the office, one could only get inside the cone, look out onto an exhibition space that was not directly accessible.

Presented at Manifesta 4, Gazebo (2002) has simillar logic: Sancho created a closed box, only accessible from the outside of Manifesta 4. Once inside it one could perceive the interior of one of Manifesta’s exhibition spaces through thin slits while in the room, the only thing to be see was the wooden bunker.

Through such division, Sancho re-creates, interprets, questions and offers new ways to perceive three-dimensional space. He also reflects on our ability to see, hear and become aware of our surroundings through our senses and our understanding.

How we perceive our surroundings depends on our knowledge of its mechanisms, understanding its rules and anticipating cause and effect. By changing these rules, challenging common sense and subverting the typical division of space, Sancho confounds our expectations and makes us re-examine our own physical relationship with the world around us. His works are a game of hide and seek where everything is visible and yet out of reach and located oddly.

Cinema and architecture are also major themes in his creations; these pieces in particular are redolent of Hitchcock’s Rear Window. All of the key elements are there: the structural weight of established architecture, the thrill of perception, the connections between interior and exterior, private and public, active and passive actions, and the conflict among the viewers between observing and being observed.

His work Cyclopean Eye: Berlin (2006) returns to these same themes. Seated in a dentist’s chair, the viewer looks into a conic structure that ends in a ‘stereoscopic sight machine’, showing a rapid succession of images with fragmentary sequences of movement through urban space in Berlin. The viewer remains static while the images fly before their eyes. Silva’s studies in the Philosophy of Consciousness have clearly not been forgotten and can also be found in his works Film machine (2003) and Ether (2003), the former a recreation of a film projection using a window and the movement of the viewer through space and the later a funnel-shaped structure connecting a sofa with a TV showing static. On the other hand, Nihilator (2003), Vertizon (2004) and Modulators (2004) are three works that develop connections between the interior and exterior of buildings, establishing a similar relationship with the city to the one developed in Cyclopean Eye, even if in this case is a virtual one.