In Red, pictured at the top of this article, a man (who turns out to be the artist’s current boyfriend) is seen from behind washing up in the kitchen, his head turned towards to the afternoon sun as it dips through a window above the sink. He says the painting with orange curtains is based on a photo taken at the home of a friend in the 1990s: “We had a fling, I was taking photos and my camera temporarily moved away from him to the window.” Here, the motif seems to represent the exterior self and the interior self, and the moment one begins to open up to another person, however fleeting that bond is. Most of his interior scenes are empty, but the figures that do appear in his work tend to be the lovers with whom he has remained in contact. “I don’t know how people can survive now.” “The co-op was great for someone like me, because it meant I could leave college without the pressure to make big bucks,” he says. In this context, his paintings seem like postcards from a lost time. It was an era before gentrification took over.” This current show was conceived in his studio in Elephant and Castle, an area of south London where Silva has worked since 1996, but which is currently being transformed by rampant property speculation, with new builds displacing older, often immigrant communities. “It was like a legal way of squatting, so we were always moving, so again I was habitually documenting the places I lived in before they were sold off. That informs how you meet people and how you view relationships, and the transient nature of those relationships.”Īfter art school he gravitated towards antifascist and anticapitalist activism, eventually becoming part of a housing co-operative that guarded empty properties. “There’s cruising, saunas, and that kind of thing. “It’s not that gay relationships are inherently less stable, but for me everything was very fluid,” he says. While studying art at Middlesex University in his early 20s, Silva flitted between the local punk scene and the gay scene in London. Mike and his mother arrived in south-east England after his parents split up. He was born in Sweden to a Sinhalese father and an English mother, and the family moving to Canada when he was very young. “I moved around a lot as a kid, I was saying goodbyes to friends, and taking photographs was always an acknowledgment of that,” Silva says.
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