One of the most influential Latin American artists of her generation, seventy-nine-year-old Regina Silveira is a small, stout woman with a throaty rasp and formidable energy demonstrated in her six-decade body of work. Silveira is one unafraid of challenge. She escaped the constraints of the flat painted surface by creating content in unconventional perspectives by mastering the art of shadow. “EXIT” is her latest solo show, with forty works on display at São Paulo’s MuBE (Museum of Brazilian Sculpture and Ecology). Among them are more than three dozen rare engravings on paper produced from 1971 to 1976 focusing on sociopolitical themes of the Years of Lead during Brazil’s military coup d’état. The highlight is the near two-hundred-square-meter floor installation “Borders,” which explores geopolitical frontiers and is activated when you put on virtual reality headsets and walk through a maze generated by algorithms that recalls the anguishing labyrinthine system that has fed mankind’s imagination since ancient Greece to today’s physical and psychological frontiers.
In 1958, Silveira graduated in visual arts in her native town of Porto Alegre, capital city of the southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul, where one of her teachers was none other than Iberê Camargo (1914-1994), Brazil’s foremost expressionist painter. With the country under military dictatorship in the 1960s, the striving young artist won a scholarship to study in Madrid, got married, and from 1969 to 1973 taught at the University of Puerto Rico along with her husband, Spanish-born conceptual artist Julio Plaza (1938-2003). She finally established herself in São Paulo and taught arts until 1985. In response to the hostile political environment of the 1970s, Silveira engaged in conceptual ephemeral art creating pamphlets, mail art and video, becoming one of the first Brazilian artists to produce art for the electronic medium.
Since the 1980s, the artist has been developing a painstaking enigmatic body of work using sciography, the projection of shade and shadow in architecture, that she is able to transform into clever illusionist perspectives in complex site-specific interventions that have grown in scale dramatically since she adopted the computer in the 1990s. These esthetic charades between reality and the imaginary are spirited visual parodies of banal objects such as stairs, tire tracks, scissors, penknife, corkscrew and artist’s easel, as well as bugs, snakes, human footprints, paw prints and the palm of the hand. Admired by young and old alike for their strong graphic appeal, these shadowed objects and distorted architectural perspectives were initially designed on graph paper and laboriously scaled up using black paint on the walls. The technique moved on to be designed on black vinyl tape cut by hand or machine and adhered to vertical or horizontal surfaces. Today her poignant perspective is computer-generated and covers large public areas and building façades such as “Lumen,” at the Palácio de Cristal, Museu Reina Sofia in Madrid, in 2005; “Irruption” Series (Saga), at the Museum of Fine Arts in Taipei, in 2006; and “Tramazul,” that covered the entire Paulista Avenue façade of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) in 2010.
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Read full interview at newcitybrazil.com.
