Regina Silveira Enigmas

Regina Silveira Enigmas

Sarah Hermanson Meister

Sarah Hermanson Meister is a curator in the department of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

In the shadow of the Brazilian military dictatorship, Regina Silveira pursued an elusive art, by necessity and by design. Absence and isolation, illusion and distortion were not only promising artistic strategies but also richly meaningful metaphors in an era of severe political repression. Trained as a painter and printmaker in her native Porto Alegre, Silveira studied with the expressionist painter Iberê Camargo. By the early 1970s she was experimenting with photographic imagery (mostly found), and became an active participant in the mail-art circuits then proliferating throughout Latin America.

These unique photograms named Enigmas date from 1981, and were made using an opaque mask (drawn by the artist to simulate a cast shadow) in perfect registration over a traditionally enlarged photographic image during the exposure process. Around this time, shadow (and its corollaries absence, trace, and afterimage) became an essential subject for Silveira, as she sought new alternatives to the rigid authority of a

singular perspective. The incongruous pairings of mundane household objects with shapes that are more difficult to classify (and that are alternately menacing and harmless) hint at Silveira’s fascination with Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades. This exploration became public in 1983 with her heralded installation In Absentia M.D. at the Sâo Paulo Biennial, where she filled the space with painted shadows of absent, imaginary representations of Duchamp’s iconic Bottle Rack and Bicycle Wheel, shadows apparently cast from pedestals that were patently empty. This representation of traces left by imagined events is a hallmark of her more recent monumentally scaled installations. Silveira’s Enigmas deftly synthesize her fascination with the ancient art of skiagraphia (shadow painting) and anamorphosis (the distortion of a singular perspective captured from oblique angles) that would become central to her practice.