Roberto Silva Ortiz
2011-2012
Painter, draftsman and etcher. He studied drawing and painting at Escuela de Artes Visuales de Santurce Puerto Rico. With 17 years, he is received as an apprentice by Rafael Trelles, one of the most representative painters of the Puerto Rican contemporary painting. He abandon his studies at the Fine Arts Department of Universidad de Puerto Rico when the Cátedra Latinoamericana de Artes Plásticas y Música awarded him with a scholarship to study printmaking at the Academia de Bellas Artes San Alejandro in Havana. At the end of his career in Cuba, he continued his works in the Canary Islands. Then he moved to Barcelona to finish the series, Colorblind. He has exhibited in Puerto Rico, Cuba, Spain, Norway, Macedonia and United States. He perseveres on contemporary representational art. Also researched on gesture drawing with the group Peregrino in Barcelona. With whom he has created two experimental works, Ofelia and Ofelia Interrumpida. The performance and exhibition Ofelia Interrumpida was presented in 2009 at Biennale des Jeunes Créateurs d’Europe et de la Méditerranée in Skopje, Macedonia.
Artist Statement
My academic training allows me to encompass different pictographical records. Driven by neo-figuration, I’ve been developing a pictorial language that moves between illustration trends and contemporary pictorial languages. The work reveals my interest in representational classical techniques and a strong influence in magical realism, a Latin American movement very famous in literature and visual art.
I have a diverse eye that allows me to be a multifaceted studio artist. Routed by a classical backgroud, and being expose to dance, theatre, music and performance art gives my work the ability to translate visually the unknow aura of the present action that occurs in performance practices.
The Kahn Family Fellowship, in memory of our colleague Peter Kahn, is designed to offer opportunities to artists seeking further experience and professional development in printmaking and book arts, and is available to artists with postgraduate degrees in printmaking or book arts locally, nationally or internationally. The Fellow is given the privileges of a Printmaker Associate, including unlimited access to the studio to produce their own work, a stipend, the possibility of teaching workshops, and editioning for others on a fee basis, and will have a solo show here at The Ink Shop for the month of June.