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King William St
Oil on canvas
1m x 1m
Feb 2021
The production of images is the action of our time. Just a hundred years ago, the activity was limited to artists, including painters, sculptors, printmakers, architects and photographers. Today, with the production of images becoming widely popular, so are images created without a purpose or aesthetic concern — like a language that spreads through a population of millions, thus going beyond its epic poems and developing colloquialisms, idioms, dialects, and ultimately breaking its own barriers as language.
Image production transcended human limits and reached robotics. Google Street View creates high-definition images of virtually all accessible roads on the planet, capturing them remotely with cameras mounted over vehicles. Software then process, combine and ready these images for consumption on the web via appropriate devices.
The resulting images are their very own kind, and are no longer cause of discomfort — unlike when they were first introduced to us, sometime around the year of 2008. Today, we can easily recognize an image produced by Google Street View: a photo taken from the middle of the road that shows distortions, mismatches, motion blurs and blurry faces.
As we become familiar, we also become unrecognizing of the fact that this body of images is a monumental feat: we can go from rural Icelandic paths to overpasses in Lagos, from Welsh alleys to Moroccan roads — in seconds, as we sit in our houses, immersed in an exclusively visual-pictorial experience.
Working with the classic oil on canvas, Carlos Silvério completes the cycle of the absurd that is the production of images: from Renaissance painting to light-taking in cameras, then to digitalizing and automation, to registering all the streets of the world — and now, back to the image in oil on canvas.
Photographs of paintings are common, but what about paintings of utilitarian photographic records that have been produced regardless of aesthetic intentions or human judgement, depicting random static street views?
These paintings kindle Art’s fundamental debates about authorship, technique, automation, aesthetic, intention. Here you can view distorted details of the streets of London through the view of Carlos Silvério of the view of Google Street View.
— Mariana Ou
Buckingham Gate
Oil on canvas
1m x 1m
Nov 2021
Shoreditch High St
Oil on canvas
1m x 1m
Mar 2021
Palace St
Oil on canvas
1m x 1m
Aug 2020
You can count the bricks in a wall by a certain road of a specific city without having ever set foot there, and maybe you never will.
Before Street View, I was introduced to Google Earth. I was fascinated by it; I would wander the software like an explorer flying over places; I would navigate Google Earth to look at photographs of cities, with all the coordinates, names and all that. Instead of watching TV, I enjoyed roving Google Earth.
The program evolved and reached a peak with Street View, which is the craziest thing humans ever conceived: taking photographs of towns and cities, street by street, 360º, in incredible resolution. It wasn’t just about looking at the planet through Google Earth anymore; now I could actually travel places, get into every pore and come to know a city without having ever set foot there.
If we think about the metaverse, navigating Street View was probably the first ‘metaversical’ experience I ever had.
-Carlos Silvério
Duke St
Oil on canvas
1m x 1m
Jan 2020
Turville St
Oil on canvas
1m x 1m
Jun 2021
Vine Hill St
Oil on canvas
1m x 1m
Jun 2019
King William St
Oil on canvas
1m x 1m
Jul 2020
Wandering through London on Street View, I look at an image and the image tells me:
'I am a painting'
I would click and roam, rotate the camera and then stumble upon views, images, compositions that I liked more than others. I started capturing these images that I found the prettiest. I captured hundreds of images and kept them stored in a folder. I would look at these images and feel an urge to document them as paintings, just like in the past, when a painter would stand at a place they thought looked beautiful and document it as a painting.
I felt an impulse to eternize photographs taken by a robot without any artistic intent with paintings, because painting has this sacred quality, an artistic status, the significance of being a unique item. I wanted to document in paintings the images that I chose according to my aesthetic judgement. -Carlos Silvério
Hoxton Square
Oil on canvas
1m x 1m
Apr 2022
Saint Peter's St
Oil on canvas
1m x 1m
Sep 2020
I kept a photo that I captured on Google Street View that has a bird in the air.
That is a photograph, but one produced by a robot on a car, conducted by a driver with no aesthetic intention, capturing moments. One day is sunny, the next isn’t. Many images have people walking on the streets, at a certain moment being captured by a blind photographer, who doesn’t know if the photo will have one, two, or no people at all. And, of course, to keep their anonymity, people will have their faces blurred, which is incredible; reminds me of Francis Bacon’s faces. -Carlos Silvério