Jardin d'agrément by Catarina Silva

Artist list

Catarina Silva

Jewellery becomes a living constellation of symbols: apples, unicorns, flowers, birds and Marian imagery evoke knowledge, care, fertility and transformation. At the heart of the exhibition, the snake emerges as a guardian rather than a tempter—a symbol of wisdom, regeneration and the continuous cycle of life.

Rather than a lost Eden, Jardin d'agrément is a poetic fiction that invites us to imagine new ways of inhabiting the world, where coexistence is not an ideal, but a living practice.

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This text is not relevant – In fact, exhibition information sheets are like the instruction manual of a car that nobody ever reads. In the same way, we never open the infinite folds of those minuscule letters that fill the package inserts of a 600 mg Brufen. Neither a pharmacist nor any car mechanic, browses that information that structures the discourse about what things are. The most pressing desire is not to know, but simply to experiment its effects. For that reason, these are not instructions to know the meaning of the lights on the dashboard.

These words want to be notes about the primaeval amazement. It is the old, but always unique thaumazein, the verb to be amazed in Greek. With the first amazement of the eyes as they come to the light and experience what is dry, but always remaining wet, thaumazein is the wonderment or the amazement. Yet it is also, in synchronicity, shock and disturbing attraction. The awe is the fascinating and tremendous mystery (mysterium tremendum et fascinans) that can be the backdrop of that type of art that renders insipid.

Therefore, decidedly, literary style: text of information sheet can be superfluous, like an account of something we are seeing. Like in the oriented visits in which the descriptions of what we see are abundant, in the wake of Diderot or Panofsky. A dull text on the contextualization of the works according to the career of the artist. An extremely long introduction on the work of the artist.

*Once upon a time there was a garden made for leisure, for recreation. The garden of pleasure or delights. In that garden there was a tree, on the tree a fruit and in the fruit an insinuating voice – a voice that exaggerates and alters the facts, giving them its distorted vision. This voice said to the Woman: “God doesn’t let you eat the fruits of any tree in this garden?” God had placed the woman and the man “in the garden of Eden, to work on it and guard it. He gave them the following orders: “You may eat the fruit of any tree, but not the fruit from the tree of knowledge, of good and evil. From this fruit you cannot eat at all. On the day you shall eat from it, you will be condemned to die.” (Gen 2 14-17. Eden is the Hebrew word for “relish”, “pleasure”, “delight”).

However, this voice came from the serpent, for she is “the cleverest of all the wild animals
created by God”. It said to the woman: «So God forbade you to eat from the fruit of all trees in the garden!». Eve replied, no! We can eat all fruits except from that tree in the centre of the garden. Except from that forbidden tree, although it looked attractive and appetizing. (Gen 3 1-2). The serpent deceived her, and so the woman ate and gave it to eat, so that, as promised by the Serpent, they would be like God.

The different cultures show the serpent – like the dragon, or other reptiles – as beings that have a soul, a “spiritual substance of spherical nature, like the sphere of the moon or like a glass recipient. They “have eyes in the front and back.” The serpent, therefore, sees the entire universe, like an “alchemical dragon” with multiple eyes. Carl Gustav Jung reminds us, about the vision of Inácio de Loyola, in which a serpent appeared that the saint contemplated without understanding if it was good or bad. Over his head, he saw a serpent full of eyes that shone like precious stones. Once again, an ambiguity is equated between the maternal or fatal character.

As the central piece of this exhibition, we have a scintillating element. Like a giant serpent skin, open and expanded, where an enormous serpent is represented with the particularity of being drawn by phosphorescent beads. That is the serpent in the centre of the garden. In the changing of the skin, as dissimulation or rebirth. This central serpent shines only in an atmosphere of darkness, which is to say, in solitude. In the absence of an observer, it appears under a nocturnal light, the brightness of the silhouette.

In this way, this enormous piece represents the primordial unconsciousness of the serpent asthe animal – that according to the alchemists – likes to remain (in cavernis et tenebrosisi locis) in caves and dark places. However, there is a necessity to surmount this state of underground hiding to give place to illumination, where the serpent drawn into the light, inaugurates the fight with the beings that want “to crush its head with the heel”.

Consciousness is transformed as it attains the light that shines from the skin. What is this animal that escapes in its crawling body, bearing witness of the cultures and myths of origin? Going back to the biblical cosmogony of the serpent, in full light, it takes the eloquent voice in the separation between the Creator and the creatures in their delightful habitat. The serpent inaugurates life outside of Eden, giving place to the eternal quest of humanity for the “first garden”. It gives birth to the human wandering, hurt by the angel’s sword that banished it from Eden. Even if its falsehood is hated by the Jewish culture, as materialisation of the force of evil, also here, as in other cultures, it takes the place of origin. By expelling humanity, with a maternal energy, from the propitious ambience
to the world.

This being a widespread archetype, it also caught Jung’s attention. For him, serpents appear in different psychic states, with different symbolic capacities: the flying serpents, those with maternal attributes and the feminine authority, demonstrating wisdom and healing power beyond rationality. The psychoanalyst characterises this animal as a “good being, that cares for the growth conditions, fertility and nourishment. Assuming the place of a magical transformation; of rebirth, the secret, the occult and the abyssal, but also as guardian of the world of the dead, or also as devourer, seducer and poisonous. In this paradox the serpent, dragon or reptile, symbolically expresses a great wealth, present in
hundreds of cosmogonies. We see it inhabiting hidden places, like holes and forests, these being symbolic uterus.

The serpent of Eden wanted to be Eve’s mother. It would have envied the legs that allow it to travel the circumference of the earth, allowing her to plant, harvest, extract copper, make bronze, to pursue gold, transforming itself into a jeweller? Did the serpent foresee that this woman would spend the long winter nights around the domesticated fire? What is more attractive, being in the garden of divine perfection, or in a secluded cave of the garden of nocturnal beasts?

The serpent might have envied the evenings of weaving of talisman-jewels, that the mother of all would bring about in the hours of darkness.

Could it be that the woman in her jewels would represent the serpent, the interlocutor in the first world dialogue, the one that brought her there through its promises of divine immortality? That figure that had given her to eat the expulsion from the perfect Garden to the garden of the world, that is simultaneously the place of sweat, tears, amazement and awe?

It was by leaving the place where the Woman and the Men gave a name to animals – a place without predators and preys – to the garden of the world, of death, of hunting but also rebirths, night, senses and intelligence on the day of joy and illumination.

The woman that today still insists on the weaving of the reconciliation between these gardens, is Catarina Silva. Outside the perfect garden, she protects and beautifies the bodies, building the garden of this side. Because, in spite of everything, it is finally a wonderment not to live in the Garden of Eden.

For here we can recreate with our own hands, the telluric forces of the voices that inhabit that garden. The ambiguous and the soft voices “like the breeze at the end of the day” wen God walked in His Garden. Nature is forgiven for the work of the woman of yesterday and today that continues to melt the metal, work the stones, to give birth to new objects, that light up awe. Today, this woman, at the centre of a noisy neighbourhood like Bairro Alto, replicates those gestures, remembering love and pain, poison and the cure, hope and disillusionment, among the shamanic qualities of the objects she creates. Thus, covering us with new skins, we can use the new remnants of the past.

/João Sarmento SJ, September 2026
Translation Rosa Tyszkiewicz


Opening: 24th September, 2 pm to 6 pm.
Finissage: 31st October.

Opening hours
Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday from 11 am to 1 pm and from 2 pm to 7 pm.
Wednesday from 2 pm to 7 pm.