Spiraling Vessels: Carlos Rosales-Silva paints a Welcome Mural at San Antonio Museum of Arts

Tarra Gaines·
San AntonioVisual Art
·

The San Antonio Museum of Art recently rolled out the welcome mural for visitors in the form of a monumental painting by Texas artist Carlos Rosales-Silva, on view through Sept. 2025. Pase Usted, which translates to “welcome in,” or “please come in,” became the inaugural artwork for SAMA’s Gateway Series that enlists contemporary artists to create new art for the museum’s Great Hall.

The Gateway perimeters asked Rosales-Silva to create a work that would interact with the architecture of the space while also drawing inspiration from SAMA’s encyclopedic collection. He responded to the tall–both literal and figurative–order with a mural of universal, cross-cultural shapes painted in glowing blue, green, yellows and vibrant red.

The mural covers the 25 ft tall and 50 ft long main wall, as well as curving around to the staircase and balcony of the lobby. The central forms are two large-scale entranceways painted around the actual entrance to the collection. He calls the two shapes portals, with a chartreuse-green rounded-arch portal representing classic European architecture and a buttery-yellow corbeled portal representing the architecture of precolonial Americas.

“I thought that was a nice way-point for the museum. Two different sides of the museum, they’re also two cultures I’m deeply interested in,” explains Rosales-Silva. “One that I’m deeply tied to, the other I’ve studied extensively. They’re also this opportunity for giant shapes. I think in terms of collage a lot of the time, color and shape layered on top of each other. They gave me the opportunity to have these big expansions of color.”

Rosales-Silva says that retinal science is something of an obsession of his and experimenting with how colors stimulate the human eyes is part of his painting practice, so selecting colors that would stimulate but not completely overwhelm became an important part of Pase Usted’s creation.

“The colors are retinal and complementary,” he describes of the juxtaposing reds, blues, greens and yellows throughout the mural. “So they’re actually kind of vibrating as you’re looking at them. They’re displacing your literal vision and creating a kind of tracer that happens with any kind of retinal color-based art.”

Responding to the museum’s collection challenged Rosales-Silva but gave him a vast selection of art for inspiration. Finding an image or form that crossed cultures and eras eluded him at first, until he noticed he was seeing many variations on that most basic and universal human-constructed object, the vessel. All humans need objects to carry our stuff, from water to food to treasures, and sooner or later humans added aesthetic elements to those objects.

“Wow there’s so many vessels here,” Rosales-Silva thought during his time spent immersing himself in SAMA’s collections. “And they’re all interesting and different but they all have this little decorative element to them, which is quite special, beautiful and unique to wherever it is from.”

One of the “decorative elements” he kept seeing on vessels from many cultures and eras was a “dynamic shape in the form of a spiral, a swirl shape that could represent a wave, a cloud, or a plant.”

He decided to create his own version of the swirl/wave form and that would take the mural into a metaphorical space.

“From there the idea was what if I turn the main lobby into a giant vessel. The museum is literally a vessel for objects but also for people, ideas and information. That’s when everything started locking into place for me.”

Putting forms and colors together, the actual act of painting also became an act of discovery of the title. Working during SAMA’s opening hours, he painted in front of a live audience of museum visitors every day, and the mural’s title, Pase Usted, came to him as people asked him questions about the work. He began to see himself as representative, not just of this one mural but for the art and people of SAMA.

“Part of the idea was to give presence and reason for people to pause and hangout and be in that space.”

—TARRA GAINES

Tarra Gaines

Tarra Gaines is a writer and teacher in Houston.