Silene

Francis Picabia was a key figure of Dada in both New York and Paris. His career spanned painting, poetry, performance, publishing and film, and he was never faithful to any single style or movement—leading Marcel Duchamp to describe his work as a “kaleidoscopic series of art experiences”. Silene is a representative work from his Transparencies series. Through a play on words in its title, Picabia layers together flower’s genus name Silene with associations drawn from the Greek Moon Goddess Selene, the Satyr Silenus, and a species of moth that shares the same etymological root. The result is a visual illusion akin to cinematic multiple exposure. Dreamlike and grotesque in atmosphere, the work not only resonates with Dada’s embrace of chaos, nonsense and irrationality as a response to global crisis, but also anticipates contemporary “interspecies” discourses that imagine new relationships between the human and the non-human.