Regina Silveira

Walter Zanini, 1997.

Almost 10 years of exploration of illusionist perspectives passed before Regina Silveira's works reached their moment of international insertion. This reveals the difficulties of a career made in Brazil, increassed by the distance from the art market and from the ideology of the official selections. Nevertheless, we can already find her readiness for a cosmopolitan interchange in the phase prior to the present objectives, that is the artistic language of the multimedia artist of the 1970's. At that time she concentrated on graphic processes of image reproduction, essentially working with drawings. Using silkscreen-her favorite- plus offset, blueprint, xerox and microfilm, she developed a thematic of significations that transited between humor and critical messages. This material, which widely and creatively used the potential of technological resources, became known through exhibitions in Brazil and abroad. The artist's active involvement with mail-art-the movement that opposed the cult of the artistic object-is worth mentioning. This period, which included experience with video art, is linked by its conceptual elements to the future evolution of her work.

In the 1960's, Regina Silveira began to paint, draw and make prints, showing empathy with figurative expressionism, a tendency with strong roots in the modernism of the country. This inclination quickly changed under abstract informal influences and more radical political changes. In Europe, at the end of the decade, she was awakened to the possibilities of spaces elaborated through geometric forms. The direct consequences of this rationalist absorption could be seen on reliefs and objects that she built with industrial materials.

When she moved to Puerto Rico in 1969, a rupture occurred between the artist-as-craftsman and the one that began to be interested in the modern means of reproductivity. The right atmosphere existed on the island for her to get enthusiastically involved in the transgressing phenomenon of dematerialization. The iconography that inaugurated this new dimension with geometric grids in perspective, called the Labirintos was soon destined to a specific semantic function; that is, she decided to put people inside the labyrinths. In order to accomplish this, she used photographs from printed media interacting with boxes in perspective. This resulted in solutions filled with humor and derision, as is evident in the enclosed crowds in Middie Class & Co. Hear goal was well planned: to produce a feeling of strangeness or "decontextualisation."

Returning to Brazil in 1973, she settled down in São Paulo where she continued with her prints and multimedia, interposing the geometrical drawings in perspective over stereotyped photographic images like city views from post cards. From this resulted Destruturas Urganas, Executivas and Brazil Today, artist's books, albums and other publications that reflect power, bureaucracy and environmental issues. The irreverent interest of the artist did not allow the art and its system to pass unnoticed. Her performances mark her incisive participation in the alternative cultural movement of the country in the 1970's.

Regina Silveira next became involved in speculating about distortions of perspective, and produced Anamorfas (1979-81), a complex of prints and drawings that opened a new horizon for her. Contributing to this definition were her former works where she made explicit the projection lines to vanishing points, and the drawings of a series of works full of critical verve which she called Jogos de Arte. Photographing everyday objects like a pair of scissors or glasses from a certain angle and height, and overlaying several reticulars in perspective, the artist could recreate them through compressions, dilations and folds, making them an enigmatic reality. But this morphology of distortions, whose procedures were enriched in a series called Simulacros (1982-84), was also the result of interpretations of artificial systems of spatial constructions based on Leonardo and Duchamp's speculations, and writings by contemporary authors like Panofsky. She was impressed in particular with the deformations of the photographic images and the forms produced by the computer which were demonstrated and studied by Pirenne.

The Simulacros, which followed Anamorfas, completed the main points of reference in her work. It is a constellation of photographic works, installations and objects, always monochromatic (black over white), reverberating with each other, which she considers as "a reflection of projected shadows, materialized as visual parody of the projective codes of the linear perspective, of the theory of shadows, of photography and of the topographic drawings." In the establishment of visual structures, based on the infraction of laws of the projection system of classical perspective, she was mostly interested in the use of viewpoints and visual angles, as she still is today.

Despite the homogeneity of all her work, which has turned to the ambiguity of perspective (little does it matter the "motives" or objects that serve as models), we should highlight along with Simulacros the work in Absentia (MD), built in a 10x20m space for the XVII Bienal de São Paulo in 1983. It was composed of monumental silhouettes from Bottlerack and Bicycle Wheel extended in oblique opposition over the floor and raised panels which enclosed the area. They were fictitious shadows that elusively parted from two absolutely empty sculpture bases. dostorting and challenging the perception according to the location and distance of the viewer.

Following the Simulacros, Silveira produced Inflexões (1985-7), a series of painted cutouts used as single pieces or as elements of installation. Her elaborated drawings were transferred to tapestry and exhibited at the Gulbekian Foundation in Lisbon (1988). Mainly the conception of new and consecutive installations like Vertice (1988-89) and Simile (1988) at the Galileo Center of Madrid dynamically filled up her time. Auditorim (1990), presented at the Trienniale of India, in New Delhi (1991), consisted of simulated rows of seats built as a virtual tri-dimensionality, but flat on the floor. Among these works is the latest silhouette designed for The Queens Museum of Art. Her research has progressed in the sense of extracting stimulus from the aspects of the surroundings where she is invited to intervene, as it happened in Solombra (1990) at he SESC-Pompéia in São Paulo, and recently in Behind the Glass (1991) at New York University's Grey Art Gallery in Greenwich Village.

If we could say that Regina's work reflects the "geometry of the absurd" and the shadows of De Chirico, it is also proper to say that elements of emotional and sensorial order, present like a memory of her past expressionism, significantly enter the hypertrophies and other alterations of her images. If she departs from geometrical grids to make parodies of the rules of perspective, she still has free choice to explore the ambiguities of perspective with a sense of humor. Withdrawing from the model, she exemplifiers what Sergio Benvenuto calls "reflexion du langage."

Analogies can be made between Regina Silveira's visual configarations and those of other artists, such as Jan Dibbets and Justen Ladda; but there is no doubt about the deeply personal path that she follows is a very intense and consequent rhythm of work in the current art context.

Walter Zanini
Art Historian
President of the Brazilian Committee
of Art History (CBHA-C.I.H.A.)

The recent years

Regina Silveira's Biography

The intensification of my foreign activities, as from the nineties, was the result of receiving foreign scholarships like the Guggenheim Foundation (1991), the Pollock-Krasner (1993) and the Fulbright (1994) ones. Therefore, the interchanges made possible by residence artist programs like the ones I carried out at the Banff Centre for the Arts, in Alberta, Canada (1993), at the Ranieri Civitella Center, in Umbertide, Italy (1995), and at the Texas University, in Austin (1998) also added to it.

These last ones resulted in participations in exhibitions like “On Mudlarkers and Measurers”, at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, at Queen's University, in Kingston, and at the Ottawa Art Gallery, in Canada (1997), and, in 1995 and 1998, in exhibitions at the Il Gabbiano Gallery, from La Spezia, Italy, a space linked to visual poetry and artist’s books production.

Retired from the University of São Paulo in 1993, after taking part in the forming of several generations of young artists, I kept in touch with several university institutes from abroad. Several exhibitions were made outside Brazil, like “To Be Continued (Latin American Puzzle)”, at the NIU Art Gallery, in Chicago (1997), and installations like “Graphos 4”, with which I participated at the “Re-Aligning Vison: Alternative Currents in South American Drawing” exhibition, at the Archer M. Hunting Art Gallery, at Texas University, in Austin (1998), were made while I was visiting scholar at the aforementioned institutions.

As for the set of recent works, I can mark two trends: first, the trend that brings up to date investigations on new image production resources by electronic techniques, started with “Encuentro” (1991) and exemplified by the “Quebra-Cabeça da América-Latina: Continua…” (“Latin America Puzzle: To be continued…”), shown at Chicago (NIU Art Gallery, 1997) and extensively in Brazil: Bolsa de Arte, Porto Alegre (1997); Brito Cimino, São Paulo (1997); Salão Nacional, Rio de Janeiro (1998), besides its itinerancy throughout the Northeastern region, at the Programa Universidade Solidária (Solidarity University Program, 1998). In that trend, from the point of view of the public works, there’s also “Super Herói (Night and Day)” (Super-hero — Night and Day), in its two versions — the collage of a shade of great dimensions, made of vinyl, over the face of a building and the illuminating projection with laser beams originally proposed as a transgressive and ephemeral vision at Paulista Avenue, on the “Diversidade da Escultura Brasileira” (Diverstiy of Brazilian Sculpture) art exhibition (1997).

The second trend derives from my growing interest for Architecture, in terms of its own traditional representation codes or from works specially conceived for predetermined architectural spaces. Here, real spaces are included, spaces where I build installations, as well as virtual ones, represented by conventional architectural drawings, which serve me as motives for distortions and estrangements.

In the case of interventions in real spaces, an example from the 90’s is “Gone Wild” (1996), the great escape of coyotes, whose hundreds of footprints were configured according to a grid in perspective and painted afterwards directly in the walls and the floor of the big entrance hall of the Museum of Contemporary Art, in San Diego, La Jolla. The work was created as an answer to the invitation of the institution to enter into a dialog with the design of the architect Robert Venturi for the reform of the museum, which had then been recently concluded.

In this way, the most telling example of distortions in the representation of the architectonic space was the exhibition “Grafias”, at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (São Paulo Art Museum), also known as MASP, in 1996. In that individual exhibition I showed graphic works with dimensions equal to whole constructions, like the distorted plant of the “Apartment”, which consists of a living-room, a sleeping room, a bathroom and a kitchen and the “Graphos” series of descending ladders made of wall tiles, whose vertiginous design indicated virtual spaces underneath the floor of the exhibition room.

I do understand that more recent installations, like “Intro” and “Irruption” (2005) ally both trends in a more emphatic way, since the exploring of new graphical resources is at the very base of the creation of images which cover, in an invasive way, several architectures (at La Mediatine, Brussels and at the Museum of Fine Arts of Houston, Texas, respectively).

In the last years some works and interventions relate to Architecture in terms of urban scales, with the very city as support for visualization. “Tropel” (Throng, 1998), invaded the face of the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo (the Bienal Foundation of São Paulo) building with a digital image printed on adhesive tape with an area of 600 square meters, constructed like an irruption of animal footsteps of several species. In 1999, the work entitled “Ex Orbis”, a digital collage of huge proportions (92 square meters) filled with drawings of flying machines, was made with adhesive vinyl and applied in the façade of the National Aviation Museum, in Ottawa, to take part in the “Passion for Wings” exhibition (1999). “Transit” (2001) is the luminous projection of the image of a giant fly made by a projector set up in an open vehicle that is moving around the urban tissue, in São Paulo (1997), Curitiba (2002) and Porto Alegre (2003). The fly was a kind of “trash” version of the “Super Herói (Night and Day)” (Super Hero — Night and Day) projected with laser, initially at Paulista Avenue, in São Paulo (1997), and afterwards, in Buenos Aires (1999), Argentina, and then in San Juan de Puerto Rico (2000).

Other works from the recent years emphasize light as its central meaning. The relation with Architecture was the founding principle of works where I registered light and shade patterns caused by sources of light that exist in reality, as it was with the shop-front in “Behind the Glass” at New York University (1991), or through entirely imaginary illumination sources, as with the project “Todas las Noches” (1999), an attempt to transform MARCO, the sculpture museum projected by the Architect Legorreta in Monterrey (Mexico), into a giant shadow box, projected by his own architecture, over a set of completely empty rooms. In the same vein of exploring light as a happening there is the “Equinócio” installation (2000), where a big sphere, made of wood, half white, half black, drags with itself the shadow that falls down from the open rosette at the upper part of one of the walls of the exhibitions spaces of the Lage Park, at Rio de Janeiro.

The word “light” outlined in fiber optic that is fixed at the windows/skylight of the MAC-USP, Museu de Arte Contemporânea de São Paulo (Museum of Contemporary Art of São Paulo), is a visual-verbal synthesis of such explorations. With its operation controlled by a photoelectric cell, “Luz” (Light, 2000) was projected to lighten up every time the outside lightning dimmed, so as to, metaphorically, bring light to the museum in the dark.

The individual exhibitions “Claraluz”, in 2003 (at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, SP) and “Lumen”, in 2005 (Palacio de Cristal, Museu Reina Sofia, Madrid) had light as the axis of their poetical pondering and assembled sets of works that were specifically related to the architectonic spaces that they occupied. In those two exhibitions, both conceptually connected, the exploration of technical resources and montage strategies allowed one to investigate new forms of operating with light as a form of immaterial covering, capable of transforming the perception and the experimenting of big spaces with strong architectonic presence.

The “Luz/Zul” exhibition, in 2006 (Centro Cultural Telemar, Rio de Janeiro) synthesizes the assumed principles of both previous exhibitions when it reasserts light as a poetical resource in order to intervene over constructed spaces and it posits itself, with them, in the open paradigm of works derived of my recurring interest on the relations between art and architecture.

Regina Silveira

Porto Alegre, RS, Brasil, 1939

Regina Silveira graduated in Visual Arts from Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul and later attained her master's degree and doctorate from the Universidade de São Paulo’s School of Communications and Arts (ECA), where she is a professor since 1974. She was awarded grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (1990), the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (1993) and the Fulbright Foundation (1994).

She showed at the 1st Havana Biennial, Cuba in 1984, the São Paulo International Biennial in 1981, 1983 and 1998, the 2nd Mercosul Visual Arts Biennial, Porto Alegre (2001), the Trienal Poli/Gráfica de San Juan, in Puerto Rico (2004) and the 6th Taipei Biennial (2006).

Her invitational group exhibitions include Re-Aligning Vision: Alternative Currents in South American Drawing at the Miami Art Museum (2001), Brazil Body and Soul, at the Guggenheim Museum, New York (2001) We Come in Peace… - Histories of the Americas, at the Art Musée Contemporain de Montreal (2004), The Shadow, at Vestsjaellands Kunstmuseum, in SorØ, Denmark (2005), Corpos em Movimento, at la Mediatine, Bruxelles (2005), Indelible Images at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston ( 2005) and Phantasmagoria, a travelling exhibition organized by ICI (NY), in 2007.

In Brazil, her works were featured in Arte/Cidade (1984 and 2002), Emoção art.ficial (2002) Subversão dos Meios at Instituto Cultural Itaú, São Paulo (2003), and Projeto Paredes, at MAM, Museum of Modern Art, São Paulo (2004).

Solo exhibitions include:Projectio at Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon (1988); Masterpieces (In Absentia), at LedisFlam Gallery,NY (1993), Grafias at Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand – MASP (1996), To be Continued, at NIU Art Museum, Chicago (1997), A Lição at Brito Cimino Gallery, São Paulo (2003), Desapariencia (Estúdio), at El Cubo, Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, in Mexico, DF(2003), In Situ at Centro Cultural São Paulo, Observatório, Octhagon Project, at the Pinacoteca do Estado de Sao Paulo (2006) and Sombra Luminosa, at the Museo de Arte Banco de la Republica, Bogotá, in 2007.

Selected installations related to specific architectures were Claraluz at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, São Paulo (2003), Derrapadas at Centro Cultural de España, in Montevideo, Uruguay (2004), Lumen at Palacio de Cristal, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, in Madrid (2005), Irruption, at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2006), Mundus Admirabilis at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Brasília (2007) and Fictions at the Museu Vale do Rio Doce, Vitória (2007).

Recent national prizes are the Sérgio Motta Prize for Art and Technology (2000), the São Paulo Art Critics Association (APCA-SP) Prize for the exhibition Claraluz (2003) and the Bravo Prize for Visual Arts for Mundus Admirabilis (2007).

Regina Silveira

Agnaldo Farias

(for the Teorema da Gaveta — Drawer’s Theorem —, USP-São Carlos)

The fascination Regina Silveira has for geometrical representations, a fascination that finally arrives at São Carlos, surprising those that regularly walk along the surroundings of the Computer Science and Mathematics Institute, up until now only used to the fragrance that looses itself off the rank of eucalyptus planted at the other side of the wall that runs alongside the narrow street, is the unfolding of her methodical confirmation that the problem of representation of things remains unsolvable. In the mythical past, there was the belief in the identity between the representation of the thing and the thing in itself – between the sign and the object. The drawing of something, as well as the enunciation of its name, meant it, it recreated that something. Soon, the distance between both terms became self-evident. The representation capacity, our biggest resource against a wild universe, paradoxically revealed itself as our biggest limitation. Through representation we intended to reach the universe, know it, illuminate it, and as a consequence of that, pacify our spiritual unrest. We would even be able to surpass it: we would create other worlds, paradisiacal or terrible ones. Nevertheless, the more we invent new forms of representing things, the more we verify the limits of each and everyone of those forms. The universe insists on keeping itself inscrutable and even the most perfect of the maps, as the one described by Jorge Luis Borges, the one that was conceived to have the same dimension of the empire that it intended to represent, will never escape its representational nature which, in this way, does not mistake itself with the thing being represented.

In that sense, one can say that the course of man is also the history of the awareness of the problems related to the representation of things. The artistic trajectory of Regina Silveira, which in this case is also her philosophical trajectory, rests in her unique contribution to that question, something she makes while discussing the methods of visual representation or the projective systems developed since the Renaissance. Among the ones used by the visual arts, the “linear perspective” stands apart. That one is a representation of things capable of simulating field depth. With that, an image (painted or engraved) transforms itself in a “window”, through which the spectator has the sensation of seeing the real space and not a plane fixed on a wall.

Each work pertaining to that series, like that magnificent drawer, a remembrance of the enthusiasm for geometry of the mathematician Achille Bassi — a patronizing figure of our Mathematics Institute of São Carlos —, praises not the object, but its representation. As the pedestrian may note, himself a mathematician or not, but someone that turns a stroll into a peripatetic pause favorable for thinking, Regina Silveira is an artist that makes the concept the body of her investigation and her work. Actually, she is not interested in the fabrication of solid volumes, in wood, stone or metal, as a more classical sculptor would prefer.

And, even while her work was being uplifted in small modules by the makers of the tile walls, she remained in São Paulo, where she lives. Definitively, Regina Silveira does not fit in the conventional artist category, the ones we admire for their technical dexterity, for their tracing virtuosity. Not that she is devoid of such skills.

One visit to her studio and the sight of her prodigious drawings and sketches would suffice to demonstrate her mastering of the handcrafting of those processes. But that's for the fact that the idea is her basis. And visually translating them, her project as an artist. It is in that sense that she puts herself into speculation about the way each thing, when touched by light, has its volume changed for a black plane, or, similarly, how each thing, when contemplated by a sharp look, can be transposed to a plane that can thus be paper or, like it is the case, magnificently amplified towards the blind face of a building.

Inside Regina Silveira’s logic, the geometrical representation of things — all kinds of anamorphosis —, besides proving its very existence, would be equally the manifestation of the enigma they bring inside of themselves, its disturbing and mysterious angle. After all, beyond its limits and its aspect, what do we retain from things when we do contemplate them? In fact, we do endless attempts to capture the essence of things, we use in such adventures all the artifices invented for the accuracy of the senses and of thought, from the instruments with which we scrutinize the inside of the matter to scientific methods, but, in the end, few are the extorted secrets.

And what are the objects that the artist elects in order to, from those very objects, gather in geometries its aspects? Common objects, images taken from advertisements (a chair, a closet, a fan, etc.) or more “noble” ones, images taken from the history of art, like the “Bicycle wheel” from Marcel Duchamp, a mobile from Alexander Calder, or further, as of now, themes taken from the history of science that is produced in our campus. A sweetly anecdotal episode, one among many, occurred during the academic life of professor Bassi, and one that helps keep his memory, someone whom the Institute owes its very existence and, as this was not enough, its prodigious and seminal library. In all the objects, indistinctly, Regina Silveira could apply her “devilishly” science, according to which the representation of a thing transforms itself in a second thing.

Treated in such a way, under the domination of a calculated disfigurement, and one that is obtained by the unusual use of geometrical systems of simple projections, all the images, deprived of its apparent volumetric sense, are equal in its opaque, black and plane aspects, with its full and broken lines. Alternatively, while confirming the existence of something, they are, at the same time, the point of departure for another territory.

Prof. Agnaldo Farias, Ph.D.
Department of Architecture and Urbanism of the Engineering School of São Carlos

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BIOGRAPHY

Regina Silveira

Walter Zanini, 1997.

The recent years

Regina Silveira's Biography

Regina Silveira

Regina Silveira

Agnaldo Farias

REGINA SILVEIRA

1939

EDUCATION

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