Thank You Thank You
2025.11.07 - 2025.12.20
Artist: Bruno Silva
Curator: Qinru ZHOU
In the unceasing consumer torrent of New York, artist Bruno Silva consciously began collecting plastic bags imprinted with the words "Thank You." For Silva, these bags possess a dual life: "They serve both as an acknowledgment of a purchase and, curiously, transform into portable good-luck charms." Evolving from a mere endpoint of consumption into a microcosm of Silva's artistic practice, these bags carry food and goods, mirroring the core motifs the artist has long explored: containers, skin, and envelopes.
This solo exhibition, Thank You, Thank You, brings together a focused selection of Silva's print transfer works and sculptures created since 2024. Departing from this repeated expression of gratitude, the exhibition invites viewers into a world brimming with dialectical tension. Here, the boundaries between seemingly opposing categories — function and dysfunction, the living and the non-living, the organic and the synthetic — begin to blur and intermingle. By contemplating and reconstructing these "circulated objects" imbued with the traces of time, Silva guides us to explore the memory and aura of matter, initiating a visual meditation on transformation, persistence, and the very essence of life.
In Silva's practice, objects are treated as images, preserved through a ritual akin to a contemporary "mummification" — a process of wrapping, saturating, and solidifying that permanently fixes the imprints of time and the sedimentation of emotion. This process allows us to glimpse a more fundamental reality within the interstices of the binary of dynamism and stasis: beneath seemingly solidified forms, all things exist in a state of perpetual flux. The series With Clarice stands as a vivid testament to this approach. Originating from Silva's profound engagement with author Clarice Lispector's stream-of-consciousness novel Água Viva (Portuguese for "Living Water"), the artist explains: "In the novel, objects and their transformations play a crucial role, reflecting the continuous flux of meaning and perception in our experience of the world. These qualities find a visual correspondence in my work: through material transformation and the recombination of imagery, I attempt to construct a visual field analogous to the 'living water' of the text, allowing viewers to glimpse those fragments of perception that are usually ephemeral in everyday experience." If we were to define this experience through Benjamin's theory, we might call it "Aura" — that "unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be.”
On another front, the metaphor of food as metabolism, exploring the eternal transformation of life's energy, runs consistently through Silva's art. It traces a path from the absorption and conversion of matter into the sustenance of life, to the metamorphosis of the body and the flow of emotion. The artist keenly observes the dual nature of skin as both barrier and conduit; his image-transfer processes themselves mimic the porous, resilient boundaries of living organisms. This concept finds concentrated expression in three sub-series within the Insomniacs series, prominently featured in this exhibition: Spirits, Blink, and Swim. Begun in 2024, the series originated with images of eyes captured from advertisements, toys, and other elements of consumer culture in urban environments, later expanding into a deeper reflection on life's metabolism. As Georges Bataille asserted, "On the whole, living matter receives more energy than is necessary for maintaining life; this excess must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically." Silva's practice can be seen as a visual annotation of this theory of "the general economy": he gazes upon the "energy excess" of consumer society and, through an artistic metabolism, transmutes it into new configurations of meaning.
After the initial "Thank You," lies a deeper layer of Gratitude. This is no longer a polite consumer transaction but a praise song for the circulated objects themselves. Silva's work invites us to embrace the flow of matter, to recognize that what the ritual of mummification preserves is not the silence of death, but life's vigorous, eternal transformation through metabolism — a becoming that thrives within every overlooked, ephemeral trace.
