We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Silvia Muleo. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Silvia below.

Alright, Silvia thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s jump back to the first dollar you earned as a creative? What can you share with us about how it happened?

The first work I ever sold was back in Florence. I made a series of monotypes of small antique mirrors in monochrome blue to raise some money for a painting and installation project that I was doing there. One of my childhood friends came to the city to visit me and he bought one of my prints to support my practice. (I think the price was around 5/10 euros). That is definitely a core memory for me. It is very special to sell a work to a person that loves and knows you because they have been with you through good and bad times, and you know that, with them, your work will exist in a place of love. When something like this happens it makes the earth beneath your feet bit by bit more solid, allowing you to build the courage to jump further.

Silvia, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’m Silvia Muleo, I was born in Pisa, Italy in 1998. I’m a visual artist based in New York. I work mainly in panting, heavily informed by my video and installation projects. I got a BFA in Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence and moved to New York in 2021 where I got my MFA at the School of Visual Arts. My work derives from my personal experience of growing up online and offline cultivating relationships and identities in these merging realities. I make paintings to confront the complexity of contemporary existence across virtual and physical spaces. I paint reflections as a metaphor to visualize the mirror world of social media. A world where reality and mediation can’t be visually discerned. Layers of mediation overlap; their subtlety more and more refined makes the already porous boundaries between physical and digital disappear, leaving us, the users, blind to the frames between these worlds.
My work is preceded by photographic research. I collect and take pictures everyday of what surrounds me to build an archive of data that gets reframed on canvas. The paintings are figurative while resisting narrative. They variate in scale from intimate to architectural, to play with the promise of reality that life size dimension provides. The ephemerality of our sense of reality is translated into thin layers of oil paint and washed out palette. As a result the subject lack stability and the viewer’s eyes can’t rely on it. The work poses unsolvable questions around reality and identity, widening the conversation on contemporary visual culture.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

My work is driven by the desire to open discussions around our current visual culture characterized by digital and physical spaces. I want to ask questions by presenting the viewer with different visual problems, like distortions, transparency, and unconventional use of boundaries. With each piece I want to allow people to open conversations around the mediation that surrounds us and the mediation that we perform on ourselves through our mobile devices. More specifically I’m interested in the visual language of digital media (like the split-screen aesthetic) and the subtle distortions that bend, stretch, and twist our sense of identity and reality; How digital and physical worlds are merging and how each of us draws a line between real and fake, between reality and construction. These are some of the questions that motivate me. It is fundamental to not only question the content, but the container too, the model itself.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

There are many rewarding aspects in my job, my favorite, at this point in my career, is the research and learning experience that goes into making each piece. Every work is a problem that needs to be solved and I often find that one piece’s solution opens the question for the one’s coming after. By doing so, each idea multiplies in the process of making. If you take up bigger and bigger challenges every day, both technical and conceptual, your time and effort will always be rewarded; no matter the result you will learn something about you and the work, and grow.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.silviamuleo.com
• Instagram: @silvia.muleo

Image Credits
I took all the photos