Silvia Felizia
Silvia Felizia is a contemporary visual artist born and raised in Argentina, currently based in Houston. From her teenage years Felizia began her career as a performance artist, a craft she developed for more than a decade in her native Córdoba. Then she moved to Buenos Aires where she studied Graphic Design and worked in the industry as a freelance artist until moving abroad in the mid 1990s. During the first years away from her home country, Felizia started self-educating in visual art and painting. Later, while living in Thailand, she learned the ancient techniques of mosaic art, which she mastered after years of practice and continues to apply to some of her paintings. Abstract and emotive, strong and vulnerable, Felizia’s body of work is drawn from her life story and the many places she has lived, including Kyiv, Bangkok, London, and Houston. Felizia has been selected for exhibitions in galleries and contemporary art platforms in Europe, Asia and the Americas. Her work is published internationally, and can be found in private collections around the globe.•
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My compositions are maps of emotional landscapes. Contrasting my childhood in Argentina and my later experience moving around the world has brought me an awareness that I didn’t have in my younger years. It made me realize how lives are deeply connected beyond time and borders. My memories, experiences, feelings, and beliefs are captured in my work, always trying to keep a balance that reconciles the push and pull from the multiple cultures I have been exposed while remaining loyal to my Latino origins.
These pieces are part of a body of work that is still evolving. It is named “The Chaos And The Calm”, and is inspired by the events that are happening in the world, all the beauty and horror alike. The abundance of shapes in the background form organic figures, resulting in chaos in some pieces, while others are very calm, reflecting my own state of mind during the creation process. Then, I create a very defined geometric shape over it, to reflect how human beings are - in our own way - living in our own world and seeing the rest from a very closed perspective, sometimes not even affected by the suffering of our neighbors. But this shape is open, as a call for faith in the future. The colors I choose are intended to showcase the power and the force of my voice. The mediums I used are acrylic and modeling paste on paper. The decision to use paper is to emulate the feeling of writing, and to transform the piece into a segment of written history.
I have always been inspired by the quote “Do not paint what you see, paint what you do not see”. In my work, I mirror my unseen internal world and give it color and vibrancy. I hope that by doing so I can create a celebration of life in my entire body of work.
Lily & Friends is a taxonomy study and meditation on nature and parasitic plants. It is a funerary process and collaboration with nature. Memories are upcycled to parasitic plants for physical and psychological regeneration. Painting becomes an act of sharing and revealing before burying and fossilizing. All the works exhibited in the Gloze showcase are of an amazon water lily named Victoria Amazonica, or, as I have come to know her, Lily.