artnexus #61

Regina Silveira (Porto Alegre, 1939) works around the problem of the forms of perception and comprehension of images. For this she appeals to a deep knowledge of the theories of representation, constructing images, whether virtual or real, to transform and ridicule them, attracted by the visual anomalies that can be achieved and manifesting the complex relationship that exists between the presence and absence of the things that are represented.

From her Simulacrums of the 1980s, she made evident that no presence is as meaningful as presence. To use daily objects taken out of context and to isolate them, allows her to investigate as much in the possibilities of two-dimensionality, as in spatiality, managing to generate questions on traditional perception.

The means that she uses show an open attitude to explore them and take advantage of the technical resource according to the specifics of the work. “… I went from painting to the computer, from ceramics to upholstery, from laser to fiber optics. The ideas by themselves asked for specific means, or the means provoked ideas for new works – one doesn’t know what comes before -.

I always went to find the best technical solution to give body to the ideas, within the poetic parameters that have characterized my work in different periods.”* In her wide Ambiental installations she comes back from a peculiar way to drawing and painting. It is sufficient to recall her Tropel in the façade of the building of the São Paulo Biennial in 1998. In parallel to her investigations on the projected shadows, the light – as the opposite side – converts into another component of investigation in which the criticism of the classic forms of western representation of light and shadow is not lacking.

  IVONNE PINI

* Regina Silveira “Means and ideas, a poetic exploration” in Lumen. Reina Sofía Art Center, Madrid, 2005.