Rafa Silvares 808, 2025

Executed in oil, Silvares’s 808, depicts shiny and perfectly round knobs in aluminum grey, embraced by intense shades of red, yellow, and blue that read as a nod to Mondrian. Another reference, indicated by the work’s title, is the iconic drum machine Roland TR-808 Rhythm Composer, a bedrock of early hip hop samples.

Silvares lovingly paints the shiny metal of his human-made motifs with an eye for precisionist effect and the beauty of their abstract shapes. Together, triangles, rectangles, slivers of black, and shades of gray form the impression of seductive silvery surfaces. The metal is a recurring motif that exerts symbolic power; its hard, lustrous, reflective shell evokes the promise of modernity with its scientistic notions of cleanliness and the antiseptic. As with the hyper-seductive surfaces of consumer objects in late capitalism, the painting is knowing, perhaps even willfully complicit in the intermingling of pain and pleasure. And yet the work has an affirmative quality: the silver lining is a belief in color and shape as forces of renewal.