Five years ago, he couldn’t paint. Now, his art is pushing boundaries.

Right now, on the mezzanine level of the Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery, there’s a collection of paintings that confound even gallery director Blair Fornwald. 

At first glance, the oil paintings don’t seem that unusual. They’re big. At times, they tiptoe towards life-sized. The works feature people and things. Many of the poses are lifted from the realm of classical art: chest-up portraits or reclining nudes. 

But, as Fornwald tells it: “The longer you spend with the work, the more the bodies and the figures in the paintings sort of start to disassemble or fall apart. [You] realize that things aren’t quite as they seem,” she says. “I think the details and the complexity of the images and the compositions are really, really something.”

It’s even more gobsmacking when it comes out that the artist behind these works has only been painting for five years.

This kind of confusion and intrigue is exactly what artist Silas Wamsley was aiming for. Wamsley was taken with 1400s Italian paintings that featured prominent figures and stories from the Catholic religious tradition. Viewers of the day would’ve understood these images instantly, but they’re much more difficult to decipher for modern audiences.  

“I have no idea why there’s a cucumber floating over top of Mary’s head,” Wamsley says with a laugh, referencing a famous painting by Carlo Crivelli from 1480. 

“I’m more interested in my current reaction to these paintings — the ways in which they inspire me not knowing,” he says. “And bringing that not knowing and that ambiguity into my paintings, to talk about really ambiguous topics, like queer sexuality, like transness, like race. These things that are moving and changing all the time in languages that can’t be contained.”

(Wamsley identifies as trans and queer.)

The result is Prospect 20: Silas Wamsley | Ceaseless, a collection ready to both baffle and captivate viewers at the MSVU gallery until Nov. 9. Wamsley’s biggest solo showcase yet, Ceaseless is inspired by Italian painters from the 15th century, a moment in art history that bridges Gothic and Renaissance art and is known as the Quattrocento. 

At first glance, there doesn’t seem to be much in common between today and the Quattrocento. But zooming out history’s long lens can prove otherwise. Both are periods of great social change, full of new technology and discovery. Wamsley has infused his works with the beautiful bewilderment he felt upon witnessing 1400s art for the first time. 

“There’s kind of a realism and a surrealism that are at odds,” says Fornwald. “They’re kind of in between being sexy images and kind of grotesque.”

Limbs akimbo, faces turning into golden masks or animal skulls, the pieces capture figures “in states of transition,” Fornwald explains. “Not necessarily in terms of trans bodies, but they are held in these poses. It’s like movement that has been stilled, or like they’re painted mid-transformation … or between life and death.”

While the Quattrocento that inspired Wamsley crafted images full of moral symbolism and Catholic storylines, the paintings of Ceaseless instead feature visibly queer bodies morphing together and hewing apart — a celebration of pleasures of the flesh, rather than an indictment of them. 

“I’m really interested in the tension between rendering things very realistically and representationally, and the body and objects as symbols of things other than what they are,” Wamsley says. “Having this looser spiritual resonance, this mythological resonance, that’s carrying over from the medieval period, while science is starting to emerge and systems of categorization are getting tighter.”

This tension, Wamsley says, “really interests me because of current conversations around identity and the ways in which there’s a real push to diversify. At the same time, that push is creating these really tight categories that are becoming really rigid.”

Wamsley started his artistic career doing collage. His painting practice work grew out of the limitations of collage art, and as he became familiar with the works of his now-favourite era of art history.

“I didn’t know how to paint or draw five years ago, but I had all this really intense visual imagery inside of me that came from certain life experiences that cracked me open in specific ways, and I really wanted to be able to create them,” he says.

“I think that specifically transness is when you’re looking at gender as this manipulatable, this kind of malleable thing, it’s liquid,” Wamsley says. “It caused me to question: ‘Okay, what else is that liquid like? What is this showing me about reality itself?'”

As political debate surrounding trans’ people’s lives seems to grow ever-louder, Wamsley knows the risk of pulling focus to another angle of the conversation, but also knows it’s worth it. “I feel hesitant. like there is this really intense political climate right now, but I don’t want that to then reduce how we talk about ourselves… I want to be able to go deeper into ambiguity regardless.”

Prospect 20: Silas Wamsley | Ceaseless runs until Nov. 9 at the Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery (166 Bedford Highway) in Halifax.