Scene XX: Graham Silveria Martin, A Degree of Focus

Matt Carey-Williams, Sandy Lane, Wiltshire, September 2026

I: LOOKING, SEEING, KNOWING, SAYING, BELIEVING

A whiff of delightful delinquency perfumes the heady air of Graham Silveria Martin’s exquisite, tender paintings. This caprice, propelled by the artist’s extraordinary gift to register flesh - shimmering in light, swelling in shadow, swooning in sybaritic fidelity - asks the viewer to look at something very closely, only to unsettle the very thing upon which their eyes have settled. The arc of looking is now no longer orchestrated by a desire for paint’s articulation and matriculation of its subject but, instead, is nourished by the artist’s design – and his medium’s innate propensity – to puzzle the authority of the Sign by having it genuflect to the beautiful but mischievous elasticity of the Signifier. That fluidity, flowing between and (con)fusing islands of image and index, is whispered by the blur of a body (itself the tango between the supple squidge of Silveria Martin’s acrylic and the concrete fixity of his source) so that a photograph glitches like paint; paint itches like skin; skin bewitches like prismatic, pearly atmosphere. What the eye assumes to be an ode to the human figure slowly – and surely – slips almost imperceptibly into the velvety wobble of abstraction, yet it is through this very slippage that Silveria Martin’s image – the Queer male body – becomes more, not less, visible. The harder you look, the more you see. The more you see, the less you know. The less you know, the harder you believe (or doubt) what the painting says, encouraging you to look harder once more. And so Silveria Martin’s cunning carousel of looking turns.

This dance between the optics and haptics of conception, inception and reception - experienced physically by the object, practically by the artist and intellectually by the viewer – recalls Jasper Johns’ comment in 1965 that “… my work is largely concerned with relations between seeing and knowing, seeing and saying, seeing and believing.” By employing almost universally understood designs such as numbers, letters, maps or targets (so simple and ubiquitous as to be almost invisible) Johns thrust his viewer into the competition between seeing and knowing. When you look at the digit ‘2’, do you see the shape or immediately think of a pair of things? Likewise, Silveria Martin’s paintings nudge form, its signification and his viewer’s appreciation of it, from the alphabet of fix into the hieroglyph of focus, now with a more libidinal persuasion. Not because his paintings are ‘focused’ in any conventional sense, nor because they seek the crisp, phenomenological certainty of a photographic, geometric or pedestrian realism, but because focus – voiced as a journey through, and quest for, imagistic and indexical texture – now itself becomes the ‘thing’ or ‘subject’ up for negotiation. Focus fuels concentration, directs attention, silences distraction. It allows author and reader to determine what matters, optically and psychologically. Focus affords clarity whilst feeding desire, describing determination and intent. It sharpens visibility; anchors desire to a person or an object; tunes in to a memory of fuzzy flesh with such precision that it makes everything surrounding it dissolve into inchoate iridescence. These are the threads that entwine to stitch together the fabric of Graham Silveria Martin’s seductive and searching work.

The paintings in Scene XX: Graham Silveria Martin, A Degree of Focus sit in two camps: figurative works that continue to draw exclusively from gay pornographic magazines from the 1970’s and 1980’s and smaller abstractions, based on peripheral or consciously less legible details of objects, foliage and light that are, themselves, all fragments from the margins of the source imagery fleshing out Silveria Martin’s male nudes, serving shards of ambience and context in the process. Hence their collective title: A Place Between. Whilst so different on the surface, both bodies of work find their synergy in a shared focus on the soft mis-registration or gentle destabilisation of the image, so that oftentimes the viewer will be confronted by both an image and a somewhat phantasmagorical ‘afterimage’ that haunts it, forcing the viewer to arbitrate between the surface – as object and process - and that which lies just beneath it – as mark and meaning. This dialogue, focused on displacement, activates the artist’s broader interest in the relationship between interiority and exteriority, whether positioned in one’s body, mind, sexuality or identity. The inner self and the public face thus contest, negotiate, but also highlight issues of visibility, privacy and, by extension, permission, that still, today, challenge Queer culture and experience.

Graham Silveria Martin, Christian, 2026, Acrylic on calico, 40 x 30 cm (15 3/4 x 11 3/4 in)

Such binary buzz beats at the heart of Silveria Martin’s Christian (2026). Typical of his practice, this is a small painting that quickly homes in on the dynamics of desire, connection and the traces they leave behind, announcing a tension born of abbreviation, amplification, corruption and distinctions between illumination and obscurity; staining and layering; surface and subject. Occupying almost all the pictorial space, Christian (named after the pornographic model Silveria Martin has based his figure on) resides in and as a structure that ebbs and flows between confession and secret. His already partially obscured face (focusing on the [already] homoerotic signification of the moustache) is further interrogated by dapples of smeared, disrupted gesso, drawing attention not to Christian’s figural or personal presence but to his status or record as an accumulation of marks. So it is that any attempt at selfhood, even when that ‘self’ has a name, must be – can only be – achieved when considered in indeterminate relation to the surface it occupies. A surface that neither props up nor consumes its subject but, instead, suspends it within an ever-shifting tectonic plane of material and optical depth. With such painterly flux in mind, now consider the attention the artist pays to the gold chain and aureate crucifix that dazzles on Christian’s muscular torso. The figure’s name, and thus his identity (and even veracity), is inextricably linked to the religion from which his name derives and which the crucifix here serves to symbolise, only for such nexus to, once again, ironically and cleverly distinguish, then conflate, the denotation of the Sign from and with the connotations of the Signifier that confront it. Desire, connection and focus now take on a rather different symbolic code, darting between the supposedly sacred and profane; self and other; seeing and believing.

Graham Silveria Martin, A place between ii, 2026, Acrylic on calico, 40 x 30 cm (15 3/4 x 11 3/4 in)

Form lingers in Silveria Martin’s paintings like a treasured taste; its longevity, again ironically, sustained by a surface corruption that discombobulates the hegemony of the human (and, specifically, Queer and male) form (and index). Such lingering (and the formal dissolution it begets) now takes centre stage in the artist’s smaller series of A Place Between paintings, all executed in 2026, so that form dissolves into patterns of presence, haunting like memories. Version II unveils a slowed-down space where balls become bokeh; arched backs cascade as tiny pools of diaphanous light; the slow stroke of curvaceous flesh now an anonymous intervention, serving a sueded, silken sensuality across the entire composition. The act of focusing here flits between our scrutinization of the surface as an abstraction and our quest for a figure within it, either subsumed or ignored. Silveria Martin thus instructs paint to chronicle that Johnsian arc of looking: a crusade for substance, perhaps hidden or lying low in fields of atmospheric dazzle or the simplicity of loose, free, unadulterated pattern. It is this act of focusing – the wiggle of a telescopic lens; the wiggle of pert buttocks – that animates these delectable, abstract places found between figure and ground; id and ego; knowing and saying and which makes manifest Silveria Martin’s search for significance. A search, born of experimentation, designed with deliberation, that asks of him, us, the painting and the delicate flummox it hums to push beyond any tremble of abstract uncertainty, any clutch at figurative beauty, and, instead, boldly ‘out’ the very marrow of meaning his subjects and surfaces, designs and desires harbour.

II: SEEING – A DEGREE OF CONCENTRATION

An intensity of concentration throbs in Silveria Martin’s paintings, yet that pulse initially manifests itself as restraint. Surfaces whisper colours from a deliberately muted palette. Figures do not announce themselves through theatrical gesture or pictorial bombast. Instead, they emerge slowly, with the uncanny caress of something or someone remembered, rather than invented. September (2026) reveals a pensive sitter; the soliloquy of his quiet introspection at odds with his casual nudity. The surface is a melody of amber, rose and woody tones – a prism of prudence that beautifully orchestrates Silveria Martin’s compositions, despite the trickles of abstraction he lets drizzle down his canvas. Purloined from a 1970’s gay pornographic magazine, Mr. September (assuming his feature celebrated the autumnal month that ushers in Autumn) is presented naked in profile, clipped at his belly button, leaving more lascivious passages to the imagination. Whilst the image is unmistakably erotic, Silveria Martin’s surface refuses the immediacy of the photographic source. Modelling is delicate, with the figure built through subtle tonal transitions and a kind of sfumato that makes flesh seem to hover between material and atmosphere, yearning and regret.

Graham Silveria Martin, September, 2026, Acrylic on calico, 100 x 80 cm (39 3/8 x 31 1/2 in)

The artist concentrates upon both image and surface only so that he can undo the immediacy of his subject. That paradox is important. The pornographic, photographic source is designed to concentrate our attention specifically on body parts both seen and – more importantly – unseen. Silveria Martin focuses on that concentration, taking the directed gaze of pornography and folding it back upon itself. The body remains - still desirable, still erotic - but now the viewer is also alerted to the artist’s construction of desire, and it is at this moment, when the arc of ‘looking’ becomes ‘seeing’, that the true status of the painting reveals itself. The figure is rendered sufficiently convincingly to satisfy our initial desire for registration, but then the painting – the DNA of the image rendered - begins to interfere. Tiny abstract striations descend the surface; stains and washes disrupt the corporeality of the body. The washy ground becomes alive at the very moment that the figure, which we all believed to be sovereign, discovers that it is not. The image is not safe; neither is the viewer.

September thus accumulates its own presence (and history) with each transparent layer, acrylic stain and tempestuous, plastery smear across the canvas; each intervention still visible beneath the next so that Silveria Martin’s surface operates less like a transparent support for an image and more like a blackboard scrawled with an equation made up of formulae of looking, making, obscuring and remaking. This provides yet another dimension of determination which fuels the artist’s (in)sight: a fortitude and perseverance to marry the sanctity of the body with its inevitable dissolution, connecting the image and its materiality; desire and distance; recognition and uncertainty. As such, Silveria Martin’s paintings do not provide an easy space upon which to focus, and it is this curious determination to eschew or arrive at any determination of image that piques and perplexes in equal measure. Such resistance in and to concentration connects Silveria Martin’s methodological frame with Dr. Fiona Anderson’s writing on ‘cruising as method’. She proposes a non-linear mode of research and production that resists predetermination so that moments of artistic encounter, and the fluidity of their synthesis, is privileged over conscious arrangement or resolution. Control thus gives way to negotiation, and this provides an especially fertile description not just of Silveria Martin’s physical surfaces, but also of the viewer’s act when seeing his work. We – like the paintings – cruise, moving through image and history, interior and exterior, pausing on the figure’s eye, the curve of his bicep, a nipple, all encountered without direction but amplified by a crop that intensifies our concentration on it and his – object, subject and artist’s – concentration on us.

III: KNOWING – A DEGREE OF CLARITY

Graham Silveria Martin, Afterimage (Rick), 2026, Acrylic on calico, steel frame, 110 x 100 cm (43 1/4 x 39 3/8 in)

Clarity beguiles as both confession and entanglement, unearthing facts yet simultaneously nourishing fiction. Silveria Martin’s protagonists understand the dilemma proposed by this dialect of focus given that their easily recognisable anatomy, whilst meticulously observed, falls prey to an abstraction propelled by memory and invention. However, in the case of Afterimage (Rick) (2026), Silveria Martin’s conundrum of clarity – conjugated as process and object – is both amplified yet further nuanced in that the image of Rick, lounging in a pool exposing his back and buttocks, shimmers with an exaggerated, satiny delineation, simultaneously mystifying and elucidating. This aura, clinging on to the figure’s outline, claims itself as both image and afterimage – past and present; representation and reproduction. Silveria Martin gives form (and after-form) to art-historian and philosopher, Georges Didi-Huberman’s idea that there is a dimension to all images that pushes back on any symbolic decoding of it. Rick, glowing in temporal and physical duplication, is presented as image and imprint: a residue of experience rather than a simple depiction or explanation. So it is that, here, Silveria Martin’s handling feels looser, more seductive, the result of less pressure with the brush coupled with a desire to scumble gesture more freely. Likewise, the trickles of abstract marks across the canvas feel weightier; the dark ground pushing the figure’s fleshy peach out of the picture plane less prosaic and more evocative. We know what the male body looks like but, because of Silveria Martin’s marriage of both act and arc - cause and effect – we now also experience Rick and the tantric energy he radiates with much more clarity.

Graham Silveria Martin, A place between v, 2026, Acrylic on calico, 40 x 30 cm (15 3/4 x 11 3/4 in)

Clarity, then, does not provide the security of knowledge; it ferments the joy, sadness, rage and elan of experience – be it produced or reproduced. Whilst all Silveria Martin’s gay pornographic models betray such fermentation with lusty brio, one must return to the smaller A Place Between paintings to see, more clearly yet, how traces of automated process or conscious irresolution can charge both focus and sensation. Version V presents almost aqueous, foggily rendered dandelions, ebbing in and out of definition, drifting between presentation and ornamentation. The delicious ambiguity of their unresolved status does not mean these tiny flowers are denied the opportunity or facility to adumbrate themselves. Rather, such doubt fuels a painting that one initially sees as a group of flowers but which, after contemplation, discloses its true task to be the disentanglement of clarity from the confines of subject or object, ushering in a more dimensional, multivalent notion of ‘knowing’ and of ‘being known’.

IV: SAYING – A DEGREE OF VISIBILITY

Graham Silveria Martin, At the Surface, 2026, Acrylic on calico, 120 x 140 cm (47 1/4 x 55 1/8 in)

The dynamic and mechanics of visibility offers up the most politically loaded of all the various forms of focus. It is in this space that Silveria Martin’s male nudes tussle with the viewer’s desire to see and their demand to not just be seen, but for them to say, speak and shout out the fact of their presence. At the Surface (2026) poses this problematic in a most poetic fashion. The cropped figure, submerged in water up to his neck, betrays a resolute face (but only from the nose down) that dazzles with a soft luminosity, in stark contrast to the murkier tonality of his body, delineated with charcoal streaks of hair and shadow, made more indecipherable yet by the water that animates both its comparative subtlety and enigma. Perhaps two different tributaries of visibility are at play here: the revelatory light of recognition but also the claustrophobic shadow of surveillance, one embracing representation, the other avoiding exposure. It is important to consider these two streams of acknowledgment when exploring the source material Silveria Martin so often turns to. Pornographic magazines such as Blueboy celebrated the male, Queer body and its libidinal energy but – as is so often the function of pornography – allowed its reader to remain anonymous, divorced, bobbing merely on the surface, without ever diving deep into the pool of content. This period – the late 1970’s to early 1980’s – is marked as a key moment in Queer liberation and yet it is also the period where HIV/AIDS began to grip the global Queer community so that what might appear, today, as some retro form of homoeroticism also carries with it another type of registration simply because we know the devastation the disease wreaked amongst Gay and Queer men during that time.

Silveria Martin embraces this duality of statement that time has varnished over his source material. This floating figure lives in a time of beauty and availability yet that time – and the community it signified – has all but disappeared. The pool water does more than just fracture shape and presence; it signifies the trace or ‘distant presence’ of a collective memory and desire that blankets Silveria Martin’s surfaces, empowering the past to breathe as present; the figure to love as lived and live as loved. Now the painting starts to ‘say’, and not just ‘be seen’, speaking to the trials of a bygone time but also acting as a milestone for the Queer community and its evolution. Note also how the figure does not directly confront the viewer because of the absence of his eyes; rather, our engagement with the figure is driven by his buoyancy – physically and perhaps emotionally. Will he keep his head above water, or will he (want or must) submit to it?

It is this gentle challenge that shapes the figure’s dance between light and shadow; hope and fear; repression and freedom. A challenge, hushing tone and mood, that beseeches its viewer to not look away but to keep looking and keep remembering this surface and the figure occupying it who refuses to go under the surface. Painting cannot turn back time yet, here, Silveria Martin’s subtle contradistinction between figuration and abstraction does evince a temporal flux so that the abstract striations quietly interrupting his surface like watermarks do more than offer formal, painterly interruptions. They mark the passing of time, corroding its certainty, growing its variegation of memories. The artist’s linear challenge – arresting both time and space – chimes with the late Professor José Esteban Muñoz’s writing on Queer temporality. By turning to found images of gay pornographic male models, taken just before the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the artist does not seek to delineate any teleological thrust to any fixed, historical narrative. The figure in the pool merely floats on a surface of possible – hopeful - understanding, bobbing between time and space, seemingly relaxed in a tension of tenses, issuing his own, reframed story as we encounter him not then, nor now, but on entangled Queer time. He tells his own story of love (and maybe loss), both grounded and elusive, a witness to his experience and to our own observation and articulation of it. And him.

V: BELIEVING – A DEGREE OF DESIRE

Graham Silveria Martin, James, 2026, Acrylic on calico, 120 x 140 cm (47 1/4 x 55 1/8 in)

Desire heaves breathlessly in the art of Graham Silveria Martin. Understandably so, given that the male models he has painted are all unashamedly, unapologetically beautiful and are purloined from an erotic world where one’s gaze is launched libidinally. However, Silveria Martin generates such desire in curious, complex ways. It is amplified through the unexpected strategy of abbreviation: buttocks and faces are almost always cropped; muscles and flesh unfurl themselves like topographies of longing without ever necessarily feeding or reading any sense of personality. Genitals remain steadfastly absent, apart from a tiny, testicular peek-a-boo served by James (2026). Whilst capturing some of the detachment and immediacy one associates with pornography, a painting like James interrupts such propinquity because of the manner of its making. Time, industry, duration, material resistance and repetition all come together to empower Silveria Martin’s painstaking process and the meticulous renditions it produces. That time and commitment spent by the artist on the image demands the same time and commitment from its viewer by its subject. We are asked to look long and hard in the same way we look at a painting by Jasper Johns or read a text by Sameul Beckett.

James’ torqued body, reclining and inviting on a bed, offers up his muscular buttocks as an entry into Silveria Martin’s composition. The exaggeration and augmentation of the male form at play here, fuels not just the erotic status of the object but also the innately libidinal status of our attention and our subsequent arc of looking. Desire foregoes truth and forgives embellishment, allowing the viewer to do more than just see, but to believe. One can believe that James is available, his bottom beckoning you and nobody else as you, alone, stare at the painting, even you know it is merely a two-dimensional surface that appears real but isn’t. Silveria Martin even reminds his viewer of the invention of his figure by employing a rosy, sun-kissed palette that knocks back his subject into the realms of dreams and fantasy. The Matrix-like abstract striations pulsing up and down the surface further confuse the image and consciously deny its verisimilitude as a figure. Yet we continue to believe; we continue to carry each fleshy wrinkle, vein, finger and butt cheek out of the pictorial realm and add it to the James we imagine – and believe - exists. The erotic mechanism of pornography is to make everyone available; the breeding of sensual and sexual desire does the opposite. Painting is thus the perfect discipline for Silveria Martin to articulate the dizzying charge of desire since it makes the body simultaneously available and unavailable. We are invited to look, but not touch, enflaming our desire for something – someone – we want but know we can never have.

Graham Silveria Martin, A place between iv, 2026, Acrylic on calico, 40 x 30 cm (15 3/4 x 11 3/4 in)

A Place Between IV (2026) offers up the same haptics of desire. Flesh is now fabric; the crease between thigh and buttock now the radiating wrinkles from a sofa cushion. The same restrained yet achingly chic palette and gessoed, painterly streaks remind the viewer that what they see, whilst not indexically real, remains physically real. The plush, plump push of pillow invited yet denied, constructed yet usurped by the brushy coordination of Silveria Martin’s process which operates like an act of veiling; his abstraction the white noise that crackles as you tune into his figuration. Body or bed; ballbag or beanbag remain desired as ‘destinations’ because of the journey those objects and people – and, crucially, our belief in them – take, led by the hand of a subtle but telling disruption. It is here where the languages of figuration and abstraction support the object to such a degree that they become conceptually – if not necessarily visually – indistinguishable. Our eyes need the body for our desire to settle on, yet we believe because of the continuous movement provided by Silveria Martin’s abstract notes. One rests as the other cruises; one attempts to close whilst the other keeps open the acts of looking, desiring and believing. The death of the figure and its libidinal thrust stalled by the vivacity of abstraction’s endless vibration.

VI: LOOKING – A DEGREE OF FOCUS

Before you can focus, you must first look. Where one looks is an act of desire and Silveria Martin’s luscious paintings understand and broadcast this. Whilst the body - male, Queer and naked – takes up most of our attention, it is what remains concealed, or becomes visible only after lengthy looking, that piques our interest most forcefully. It is thus not just the body, or the fashion of the artist’s rendering of it, that assumes thematic dominion. It is the very nature of attention and our consequent act of looking that intellectually lubricates Silveria Martin’s new body of work.

Graham Silveria Martin, Joe, 2026, Acrylic on calico, 50 x 40 cm (19 3/4 x 15 3/4 in)

Our focus on Joe (2026) turns a body into a field of abstraction; shadow into light; lust into apathy back to lust again. The compass of focus we turn as we look closely at this painting also charts the object’s journey from moment to photograph to painting to memory to desire, revealing Silveria Martin’s stunning choreography of body and ground, figuration and abstraction to be one rewarded by the fecundity of fusion, not the altercation of segregation. On the same picture plane, the same subject speaks in two different dialects: one that looks to be coveted, the other to remind us that looking is never simple, and nor should it be. We focus on things or people because we see them, know them, want to believe in them. Focusing is about insisting – and making – something matter, and Silveria Martin’s paintings do exactly that, making his sumptuous images and their important meanings and messages emerge into the light when history (especially contemporary history) has let them recede into the margins of peripheral indifference. Somewhere in that tiny, politically-charged movement of Silveria Martin’s brush - somewhere between looking but not seeing, between object and subject, between his found image and the time, faculty and care he takes to breathe life back into it – the viewer understands that desire and memory are born and sustained by degrees of focus and that looking itself becomes – and always was - the subject.

Matt Carey-Williams
Sandy Lane, Wiltshire
17-22 September 2026