In the artworks of Sidival Fila, salvaged objects and fabrics become transformed into remarkable abstract creations that speak to the possibilities of redemption as well as to the relationships—between past and present, spiritual and worldly, self and other—that define lived experience.

Born in Brazil in 1962, Sidival Fila moved to Italy in his early twenties to pursue an artistic career. Shortly afterwards, he felt a religious calling and joined the order of the Friars Minor of St. Francis of Assisi. For the past several years, he has resided at the Convent of San Bonaventura, a 17th-century Franciscan monastery on Rome’s Palatine Hill. Since 2009, when he returned to art-making, the monastery has also served as a studio where Fila works primarily with discarded canvases and fabrics—some as early as the 15th century—of cotton, silk, hemp, brocade. He cuts, stitches, and arranges these materials into new configurations that explore color, light, and form. In his art, according to Fila, “there is nothing that refers figuratively or explicitly to the religious, but there is a reference to a tension toward the transcendent. My desire is to make matter spiritual from a perceptual point of view, to make it fluid, to make color a chromatic energy. These are dimensions that refer to our conception of spirit: which, even for the secular world, is light, transparency, lightness.”