Light, memory, and perception: ahead of his upcoming exhibition in Milan, Silvio Wolf reflects on some of his most emblematic works, in a dialogue at the edge of the visible.
This interview with Silvio Wolf was originally written and published by me in Italian on Artribune, the leading Italian magazine for contemporary art. You can read the original version here.
Below is my English translation of that article.
Silvio Wolf (Milan, 1952) turns light into language. His site-specific installations fuse photography, architecture, and collective memory, generating perceptual experiences in which past and present coexist in the same instant. His works open passages between the visible and the invisible, between the world and its image. When I met him in his studio in Milan, our conversation lasted more than two and a half hours.
In front of me was one of his most emblematic works, Mirror Threshold – Aperture (2009). Facing that mirrored surface, the very perception of time seemed suspended. I suddenly found myself part of the work, reflected in the opening, absorbed into its optical space. I was myself, as Silvio said, “a piece of fixed time-based art.” In that moment I understood that his work does not represent reality; it activates it. Every viewer becomes a co-author. Time and image coincide in the present.
Interview with Silvio Wolf
Three works in particular struck me deeply in your practice. The first is The Two Doors. Can you tell me about it?
The Two Doors is a photograph I took a long time ago, when I still wasn’t fully aware of what I was looking for. Two different doors, one Islamic and the other Western, placed face to face: two possibilities, two worlds that exclude and mirror each other. It is an image of waiting, of choice, but also of impossibility. In my work, the threshold is always a place of knowledge. It is not what you cross, but what makes you pause, look, and reflect. That is where reality and imagination touch.
In the late Nineties you created Luci Bianche (White Lights), a complex and poetic work inside the Palazzo delle Stelline in Milan.
Yes, Luci Bianche was created for the Refectory of Palazzo delle Stelline, a place charged with memory. That is where the orphaned girls of Milan lived, known as “le Stelline.” I worked with original photographs preserved in the archives of Pio Albergo Trivulzio, transforming them into a single 65-meter-long image that occupied the entire north wall. On the opposite side, ten tables held twenty monitors that showed the girls’ faces, an uninterrupted flow of presences.
In the darkened space you could hear their voices, recorded by the children’s choir of Teatro alla Scala in Milan, pronouncing female names that emerged out of the silence of the room. It was as if the very memory of the place had come back to life in their light. The images did not simply represent; they inhabited the space. Light and architecture, time and voice came together in a single symbolic body.
Your work Infinite, originally conceived for the Venice Biennale, seems to take this reflection further and amplify it. How did it come about?
Infinite was born from a simple, intimate gesture: my son throwing a stone into the water. I photographed that moment, the instant when the surface breaks and generates concentric circles. Everything began from that image. I then developed the work on a waterproof material, placed slightly below the surface of the water so that natural light could interact with it. It is a work that breathes between image and environment, body and reflection.
Infinite is a sensorial passage, a place where the finite opens onto the infinite and the image becomes absolute presence. However, Infinite was not ultimately presented at the Venice Biennale. The curator told me that the outdoor space was no longer available, and I chose instead to exhibit The Names of Time inside the Tese delle Vergini. So Infinite remains, for now, a theoretical work; a suspended project that is still very much alive.
How was your experience at the 53rd Venice Biennale?
(He smiles.) Well, my most amusing memory is that one day I got a phone call from a woman telling me I had been selected for the Biennale. I was about to hang up, convinced it was a joke! Then, slowly, I realized it was all true.
The Biennale was an intense experience, also because of its logistical and symbolic complexity. Exhibiting in that context means confronting a collective history of art and the responsibility of adding your own voice, a fragment of time, to a chorus of visions.
In Mirror Threshold – Aperture the relationship with the viewer becomes even more direct.
Yes. There the image is reduced to a fragment, while the viewer becomes part of the work through their own reflection. The boundary between seeing and being seen dissolves. Each gaze reactivates the work. It is a dialogue between the visible and the invisible, where the image is no longer an object but an event that renews itself every time.
Which are the three works you love the most, and why?
I would say The Two Doors, Mirror Threshold – Aperture, and Large Myhrab. The Two Doors because it is the origin of everything, the threshold that potentially contains my entire path. Mirror Threshold – Aperture because the work is only completed through the person who looks at it. It is a living, shared experience. And Grande Myhrab because it represents my idea of infinity as presence: a wall that does not divide but unites, that shelters and reflects. It is a living surface, a skin that breathes the light of the world.
What are your upcoming projects or directions of research?
The next appointment will start on February 24, with the exhibition La Vita Segreta delle Cose (The Secret Life of Things) at Building Terzo Piano in Milan. I can anticipate that I will be showing some historical works alongside others created specifically for the occasion. The works explore the enigma of space and the mystery of perception as it shifts from the four-dimensionality of reality to the two-dimensionality of photographic vision; they operate on the threshold between the visible and the non-visible, in the mental space of thought that sees and recognizes itself in what already is. Within the exhibition there will also be an experiential visual and sound installation.
Ultimately, every work of mine is born to question the space that separates us from what we see: that thin gap where light becomes memory and perception becomes presence. That is where I will continue to search.
Antonino La Vela
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