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The great English man of letters, Samuel Johnson once wrote that there is nothing uglier than that on the verge of beauty. On the occasion of Sebastian Silva’s new exhibition of drawings and paintings in Santiago, I’d like to propose an up-to-date, end of the world, 21st century corrolary: there is nothing so beautiful than that on the verge of ugliness.

Beauty under distress—as another literary lion, Edmund Burke, referred to it—is what Silva strives for, time and again, in his scripts, his prize-winning films and in his music. For those that did not know that the polymath Silva started out as a visual artist, this show will prove at once surprising and familiar. The controlled fury that makes films like La Nana and La Vida Me Mata boil slowly until they explode off the screen exists in fullfledged form in his expressionistic drawings and paintings on paper. Pictures Silva has titled “Crime” and “Werewolves”—in a darkly dramatic vein that recalls both Dostoyevsky’s troubled novels and Fritz Lang’s M—these roiling, unspooling series mine mysteries, secrets, lies and treacheries of the most bitterly pedestrian variety.

Works Silva made in New York while filming an HBO series called The Boring Life of Jacqueline (the artist’s ironic title, of course), this voluminous “side project” obsessively explores the little demons of malice hidden under today’s effortless-looking gloss of cool civility and purported technological sophistication. Beneath the emailing, facebooking, twittering nonsense that folks all over the world actively pretend constitute genuine social networks, Silva discovers something much more trenchant and familiar: everyday pathos, disappointments, doubts and miseries that no new entertainment or I-Phone app can pinpoint or deactivate.

Ticking time bombs as real as the killer IEDs detonated on the side of the road in Gaza or Baghdad, Silva transposes what he once called “the sad miserable shit that nobody shares, but everybody goes through” into fantastically drawn figures both committing and covering up crimes, or, alternately—in the case of the series “Werewolves”—suffering the bona fide traumas of everyday anxieties and paranoias that constitute largely inconspicuous human psychological transformations. Tapping into a nearly inexplicable fad that has seen shapeshifting myths like werewolves and vampires reemerge as a viable Hollywood genre (who knew?) and also as an embarrassingly moronic global Goth subculture (who cares?), Silva has cast his own figures as faceless demons—anonymous beings that channel the aggression and violence everyone naturally feels when considering their boss’ tacky Mercedes or the misfortune that should befall certain national politicians. Silva touches on these feelings and others in this generous exhibition that, in turn, profiles him as an existential artist après la lettre. An artist committed to unearthing the undead spirit of a lingering humanism that is as relevant today as it was before Jean Baudrillard blathered on about the world being made up entirely of simulacra and simulation, Silva’s drawings, paintings, scripts, films and music are an antidote to that and other bloodsucking propositions. They affirm, vibrantly and with a dark passion that can only be defined as lifeaffirming, that no one’s existance is ever boring. Not yours, not mine, and certainly not his.

Christian Viveros-Fauné