On view at Galleria Eugenia Delfini in Rome, Caterina Silva continues her radical exploration of the limits of language and representation. Through painting, fragmentation, and performative gestures, her works avoid closed forms, opening instead spaces of ambiguity, silence, and resistance to fixed meaning.In a time that demands constant naming—where everything must be said to exist and to matter—Silva’s painting performs a counterintuitive act: it eludes, escapes, withdraws. The exhibition Things that will never become objects unfolds as a constellation of undefined forms, unfinished processes, and deliberately ambiguous languages. This is not merely a formal strategy, but an ethical and epistemological stance towards the world. Silva has long worked at a threshold—the one that separates things from objects, bodies from their representations, signs from fixed meaning. Her painting does not aim to describe, but to dismantle. In this sense, the exhibition title reads almost as a manifesto: the “things” that will never become “objects” are figures that resist semantic appropriation—presences that refuse function, category, or narrative. This attitude can be read as an implicit critique of capitalist visual logic, where even images are commodified precisely because they are recognizable, intelligible, archivable.
Installation view: “Things that will never become objects” by Caterina Silva. Galleria Eugenia Delfini, Roma. Ph. by Sebastiano Luciano. Courtesy Galleria Eugenia Delfini
Oh-lym-pia, one of the two large canvases on view, revisits Manet’s iconic nude from a distance—without slipping into ironic quotation or conceptual transposition. Instead, Silva deconstructs the 19th-century painting into a palimpsest of chromatic traces and sign-like rhythms that defy immediate recognition. The figure vanishes, and what remains are fragments that suggest rather than reveal. The result is a rarefied spatiality, one that does not oppose light and shadow but weaves them together into a fabric of floating presences. In place of scene: rhythm. In place of subject: vibration. Divide et impera (green) operates similarly in a field of tension between structure and rupture. The reference to a “divide and conquer” algorithm is not illustrative but provocative. Silva reworks this framework through a painterly grammar that refuses computational logic. Marks, incomplete geometric forms, tangled pigments: all inhabit an unstable field without clear hierarchy. If the algorithm reduces and simplifies, Silva opens toward multiplicity and ambiguity. The canvas becomes an organism charged with unresolved tensions.
Installation view: “Things that will never become objects” by Caterina Silva. Galleria Eugenia Delfini, Roma. Ph. by Sebastiano Luciano. Courtesy Galleria Eugenia Delfini
It is perhaps in the series Le cose non mi hanno aspettato (“Things did not wait for me”) that Silva most radically fulfills her subtractive process. The canvases, cut and rewrapped into cylinders, lose their bidimensionality entirely; the act of painting is physically interrupted, deconstructed, folded in on itself. The artwork becomes sculpture, body, rupture. This act of “tampering” hints at sabotage—not just of the image, but of the very device of vision. The painting is no longer a surface to be read, but an opaque, enigmatic object. Vision becomes a perceptual experiment: discontinuous, fragmentary. The thought animating Silva’s practice resonates with the ideas of philosophers such as Byung-Chul Han and Maurice Blanchot. In Saving Beauty, Han critiques our age of transparency and positivity, advocating instead for an aesthetics of opacity and contemplation. True beauty, for Han, lies not in polished surfaces but in the depths that resist the gaze. Blanchot, for his part, evokes an aesthetics of the neutral, an artwork that exists through its very withdrawal—through its refusal to become fully present. Silva’s painting seems to embrace both views: what we see is always partly what escapes us, what remains suspended, unsaid, unfinished. Form becomes tension, not stability.
Installation view: “Things that will never become objects” by Caterina Silva. Galleria Eugenia Delfini, Roma. Ph. by Sebastiano Luciano. Courtesy Galleria Eugenia Delfini
With Things that will never become objects, Silva delivers a silent yet powerful exhibition, one that resists any desire for total interpretation or closure. It is a rare and necessary invitation to stand before the artwork without the urge to possess it—allowing images to exist as fragments, remnants, unrealized potential. In a present obsessed with transparency and constant communication, Silva’s painting becomes an ode to forms that do not resolve, to words that refuse to name, to images that remain—happily—ungraspable. An art that does not illustrate, reassure, or explain, but rather continues to ask questions where language falters—perhaps for that very reason, it remains stubbornly, vitally necessary.
Info:
Caterina Silva. Things that will never become objects
Galleria Eugenia Delfini
Via Giulia, 96 Rome
April 30 – July 5, 2025
Micol Di Veroli (Rome, 1976) is an art historian, critic and independent curator. She is a member of AICA – International Association of Art Critics. Since 2010 she has been curator of Glocal Project Consulting and collaborates with several international museums creating projects aimed at promoting and supporting Italian art abroad.
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