Regina Silveira: Where Shadows Vanish (Midday; moment of the shortest shadow; end of the longest error; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.) Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols. Terra dos gigantes Super-Homem, Super-Mosca. Luiz Melodia, Magrelinha. The idea that painting ¿began by tracing an outline around a man¿s shadow¿ probably originates in Pliny the Elder¿s (AD 23-79) voluminous work, Historia Naturalis.1 Although what we now know about the pre-historical Lascaux paintings does not seem to endorse Pliny¿s idea, the notion that an object¿s shadow is a ¿even, the¿ main ingredient in its representation restores a value denied to it since Plato¿s indictment of all semblances in his famous Allegory of the Cave. In the twentieth-century avant-garde artists like Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and more recently, Christian Boltanski produced seminal works that brought substance back to shadows. Yet Regina Silveira¿s sustained twenty-five year exploration of the aesthetics of shadows has been more systematic and encompassing than that of any artist hitherto. Perhaps the first evidence of skiagraphia (shadow painting) in Silveira¿s work is a series of photographic works she called Enigmas (1981) in which the shadows of a saw, a hammer and a fork ¿detached from the objects that projected them¿descend upon a valise, a typewriter and a telephone, respectively. What made these works more than playful is the way shadows settled on the surface of these utilitarian objects; i.e., as if they had the material properties of fabric. From these works important features became apparent that were decisive for Silveira¿s later works: the angle of projection of light/shadow onto an irregular surface, the geometrical logic of shadows, and the point of view of the beholder. A few years later in Projectio II (1984), Silveira painted the shadow of a ladder onto the surface of three walls at right angles with each other so that it looked ¿correct¿ only from the exact point from which it was projected. The elastic properties of shadows led Silveira¿s work towards anamorphous art. Known since the Renaissance this type of art consists of pictures intentionally distorted except when viewed in a special way; e.g., through a cylindrical mirror or from a specific angle to the surface where the image lies. This type of art entails the explicit admission of a viewer and a point of view. Silveira ¿perhaps the most eloquent commentator of her work¿states, ¿I wanted perspective to act like a sort of philosophical look at the world of appearances, delving into our recognition of the things in our surroundings.¿ Silveira¿s series In Absentia: Masterpieces allude to the legend of the origin of painting cited by Pliny. A potter¿s daughter was in love with a young man whose face she drew by outlining its shadow on the wall so she could remember him during his absence. At least two installations of this same series allude to Silveira¿s artistic mentors: Duchamp and Man Ray. In Absentia; M. Duchamp (1988) quotes the widowed wheel in Duchamp¿s readymade Bicycle Wheel (1913), his photographic work Shadows of Readymades (1918), and the very last painting he made, Tu m¿ (1918). On the other hand, In Absentia; Man Ray (1998) honors the work of the artist whose ¿rayographs¿ (Man¿s name for ¿photograms¿) reversed the tonal values of shadows by showing them as light areas whereas lighted areas appear dark. However, the Man Ray work to which In absentia alludes is not a photograph, but rather a readymade, Le Cadeau (1921) ¿the prickly iron whose insubordinate domesticity makes an unlikely gift. Silveira¿s homage to these two artists evidences her penchant for the Dadaist principle of ¿destructive projection of all formal art¿ ¿with a twist. In Sombras, from the series Dilatáveis (1981/1993), Silveira depicted two men in dark suits and one in a military uniform whose shadows were seven times bigger than they. In Silveira¿s works political commentary is not expressed as rig...