The Brazilian artist Regina Silveira has a long career in which she tries to explore different notions of reality through her work with lights, shadows and distortions. In her five decades of artistic work, she has dealt with themes and explored media that tie in with her idea. "I choose the medium that best solves my intentions, and then I look for the skills and technical resources to make the work feasible, focusing on being a non-specialist in any medium." The artist exhibited in Europe and the American continent, much of her work is in public collections such as the Reina Sofía museum.
You’ve told an anecdote about Iberê Camargo, about a paintbrush falling on top of a moving tram in his painting classes in 1961. Would you say this was your first approach to painting? What was he like and how did he influence your artistic career?
This certainly changed the direction of my work. That gesture was a radical lesson: throwing a soft-bristled paintbrush out of the window, from a female student who was carefully painting a view of the tram terminal, left the students stunned and speechless as they saw the brush on top of a departing tram. At the time, I was already a painter, participating in art salons and assisting the artist and teacher João Fahrion in his drawing classes at the Institute of Arts, where I had graduated a year earlier. The most important thing about this story of the brush, which was at the beginning of that course at the Atelier Livre in Porto Alegre, is that Iberê then borrowed a stiff bristle brush, sat down in front of the student's canvas and passionately repainted it, masterly and with a huge amount of ink. The new painting gained autonomy and was practically a real other, in front of the reality data that it previously wanted to represent. For me, it was the first clear notion of art as abstraction and language.
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