On Dis-Appearances
Regina Silveira, 2004.
My first image characterized by “invisibility” was a painter’s easel that I had taken from a catalogue of artist’s materials. I rendered it as a line drawing with strong lineal perspective, a stretched an anamorphic composition, an ambient scale, and completely formed by intermittent lines. In that dis-appearance from 1997, in wich the lines were produced in adhesive vinyl for direct application to floor and walls, the interpretation of invisibility was guaranteed by the geometric code of interrupted lines, which conventionally represents the hidden, the transparent or the phantasmagoric. I wanted to create an image-precis, that would synthesize various recurrent reflections on representation and the role of painting.
From that to the current Dis-appearance(Studio), displayed in the Sala de Arte Publico Siqueiros(México City), I’ve been critically exploring this repertoire of images depicting easels, furnishings and instruments of traditional painting studios. Employing the same codification of “invisibility”, I created various installations with images of studios, that I intended as visual “scenes” constructed with radical perspectives and distortions, always executed with adhesive material so that they could be, physically and optically, “inserted” into the real spaces for which they were intended. All these dis-appearances were conceived via multiple diagrams, arranged on the floors and walls that they’ve temporarily occupied. These “perspectivised” scenes always finally involve an optical recomposition of the original image from specific points of view.
Nonetheless, the most provocative aspect(for me) is the perceptual vertigo of the conflict established between the experience of the real spaces and the visual paradoxes they provoke, due to questions of scale and placement.
Dis-appearance (Studio), my most recent exploration of this paradigm of visualizations and proposals, was created specifically for “El Cubo”, a space built in what had been the garden of the muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros’s house. With its enormous dimensions, with windows near the ceiling and high walls, the gallery is next to what was Siqueiro’s studio. In this context and given these characteristics, “El Cubo” offered an irresistible space for the development of the concepts and drawings involved in this dis-appearance, the most extensive of the series, with its excessive visual hyperbole. The diverse easels and furniture constitute a collective studio scene, whose elements are represented at such large scales that they become almost architectonic, while making it impossible to apprehend the scene from any fixed point.
Dis-appearance (Studio) has allowed me a productive dialogue with the perspectival solutions and multiple diagrams used by Siqueiros for his painted murals (wich he referred to as “polyangularity”), as well as to express in visual terms, my sympathy with his critical texts on easel painting which he already found inadequate, for both the desire social aims of art and for his reationship with modern architecture, since, with his visionary sensibility, he wished for new means to unite painting and film.
Silveira, Regina, "On Dis-Appearances". Revista " art.es ". nª 6-7 (nov. 2004), pp.116-117.
Mirror of Heavens
José Teixeira Coelho Netto
Every great artist is dangerous. Dangerous for those they interact with (the gallery tha shows their works, the artisan that executes the basic tasks), critics (uncertain as to the value of what they see), and the public (who do not know how to react to something that does not show the usual signs of artisticity and suspect that all this is ultimately being done against them). All artists are dangerous to themselves above all, in their doing things that risk their own expression, thei chances of executing a work as planned, recognition from others. This type of artist is a generalized threat.
The most uncommon radicality of Regina Silveira is seen in the basic options that she exercises. At a time in art when people will insist that anything whatsoever is art, Regina Silveira is associated with the instating tradition of art: knowing-how, mastering codes, painstakingly ensuring that everything is in its place, rigorously calculating effects. Secondly, in her committing to the narrative accumulated by art, from which she extracts certain techniques (and to which she returns them, to reinforce the narrative) – perspective, reinvented; anamorphosis, magnified – and certain founding themes (easel, artist´s studio, geometrical solids from one´s first ever art lesson, decisive works by recognized artists). Thirdly, in her deciding to profoundly review ways of using and representing these themes and techniques.
Silveira rejects the commonplaces and the rut in which part of contemporary art gets stuck, such as insisting on ease of execution (much installation and performance) or the literality of what is represented (much servile realism in photography) – or contrariwise insisting on obscurity in relation to what the work is said to contain (conceptualisms whose artists or curators are their main audiences, or the only ones). She takes the vital principles of this same contemporary art and pushes them to extremes.
In her words – and she knows what she is talking about – her chosen battlefield is that of representation, with all its limits and alternatives. But this does not mean she is trapped within the narrow bounds of art that only speaks of art. The world outside art is also involved in her pieces: the world of everyday people and objects, the artificial world of Man, the world of the history of the place where art is made. Objects in the world she takes possession of may be a large sculpture by a major modernist or an almost irrelevant ladder or pool, or a tiny filthy fly or an enormous body of clean water. Her recurring territory is metaphysics – un unconfortable place where nobody ventures lightly – but also that of the most mundane irony. Almost always, the two battle for space in one and the same work. This, again, disturbs the public, dealers, and critics. The great majority of contemporary visual art in fact consists of works that are too small, or too brief (even when they are large in size) to contain more than one aesthetic category, much less categories that accumulate antagonistic tones. Today, this is more often seen in literature or the cinema. But it may be found in the work of truly dangerous artists of the past, or of the present day.
Furthermore, in the case of Regina Silveira, there is not always a solid work that the artist leaves behind as aesthetic residue. Her material of choice may be an object classically defined as such (a saint, a sphere) or (perhaps more importantly) paint applied beside an object on the floor and on the wall that is later erased and reworked, or a vinyl cut out and applied then taken off and ruined or carefully stored and carefully reassembled. There is a physical instability in this artist´s work (sometimes what one purchases from her is just a CD-ROM with instructions for the future work to install) that can only be proposed by somebody who is sure of what she is doing in the context of a scenario that is however still dominated by traditional letters and values (canvas, object).
The aesthetic values Silveira poses are demanding ones, and at the same time are constantly submitted to reappraisal (by Silveira herself, to begin with). Running all risks, and not least that of finding herself alone in her own space, Silveira defined for her art a place of national and now worldwide dimension - which is a good thing in one who – like every great artist – audaciously strives to populate the world and life with her devices.
Danger and depths to the ocean God gave
But it is in him that the sky is reflected.
Fernando Pessoa
Coelho Netto, José Teixeira. "Mirror of Heaven" In "Regina Silveira", Brazilian Art Book VI, São Paulo, JC Editora, 2005, pp.356-358.
Translation from One System to Another
Mario Ramiro, 2001.
“From a high tower, from a turret,
the dreamer sometimes receives the function of watchman.”
G. Bachelard
The problem is not new and much has been written on the impossibility of speaking or writing about a work of art. After all, how do we translate the entirety of an image field to the linearity and sequencing of distinct elements that characterize the writing form? How to reduce a drawing projected on the floor and the walls of a space to a series of parallel lines formed by isolated words on the surface of a sheet of paper? Such a fantastic understanding one ought to have to compact all that volume of surrounding information in the reduced dimensions of a white page!
The objectification of subjectivism
The drawing we have in view is not one about a simple subjective representation of a group of objects apprehended by an artist. It is about a drawing that was structured from a specific code that translates subjectivity into a science of representation. The drawing made by Regina Silveira was built according to the assumed perspective principles, which during Renaissance raised art to the category of science, “rationalizing the subjective visual impression to such a degree that it became the founding principle of the construction of an empirical world deeply grounded”, “in that it rationalizes the subjective visual impression to the point of being able to construct an empirical world upon a solid and yet infinite foundation”.(Panofsky).
Concepts converted into images
When we take a picture, using a conventional camera, the atmosphere present around everything shows up as pure invisibility, unless specific circumstances occur. That happens not because the camera would register the world the way our eyes see it, but because the program embedded in the photo device does not establish patterns to such a captivation. Nevertheless, certain photographic techniques allows us the possibility of visualizing the atmospheric presence and that serves to illustrate how our apprehension of things is conditioned to a specific code, to a program. The same goes with drawing. “Item perspectiva is a Latin expression that means seeing through”, and the history of such geometrical construction form reveals us the long evolution of a code of visual representation which allows us, from some concrete conventions, not only to visualize the tridimensional world projected on a plane surface, but also to see through solids or to see that which, otherwise, would be invisible.
We see what we know
The perspective projection carried out in the Torreão space, in Porto Alegre, represents not only three distinct objects, but objects coded as transparent ones. The dotted line was chosen as the language of drawing to represent not only transparency or invisibility, but also to reveal us eventual objects put behind that which we would be seeing in the foreground. From that we could imagine that the cubic space of Torreão would be conceptually empty and that the three objects we seem to see in the room, “in reality” would be outside it, behind the “white cube” volume. But the “Disappearance” of Regina Silveira is there, in front of us and under our feet. Her “Studio” is represented by a set of canvas, rack and bench. Between them there is nothing that can be identified as ink bottles, brush or palette (which appear in a sketch reproduced in the exhibitions invitation). That is, in the “Studio” there is no indication of any instrument that may engrave or print any image in the surface of the canvas attached to that rack.
Mental dimension
Regina Silveira’s work seem to indicate us that in that “Studio” the image is not projected over a surface celebrated by art (the canvas), but in a conceptual plane. The closed windows of the exhibition’s space also indicate this. In a closed Turret there is no way of looking aloof, and to foresee the horizon line. The inner space from the upper tower seems to have been transformed in a space similar to our mental one, one in which we project concepts and ideas about things. In it, we do not look outside, but inside, “in the space where concepts are transformed into images” (Flusser). From the top of the Turret, Bachelard’s dreamer enlightens his reveries.
Ramiro, Mario. "Translation from One System to Another" . In Regina Silveira"Desaparência", Torreão, Porto Alegre, 2001.
