Reviews

Potency of Image, still

Teixeira Coelho

The main word, here, is transfiguration. The exhibition is of contemporary art and this word carries an archaic, religious resonance. But the inadequacy of such an approximation – between distant times and things we forgot that once went together and that actually have never totally divorced – is only apparent. Perhaps the word wouldn’t have occurred to me, with its significance for the present day, if I weren’t rereading, at the moment when I saw the final version of Regina Silveira’s installation, an essay by Baudrillard about the bankruptcy of contemporary art. In this text the author speaks of a present day art that may be living much above its possibilities (like in a life of fantasy in which the characters cannot "top the bill", as it happens with middle-class today) and way beyond its ends for having accepted (and contributed to) the death of illusion and promoted the de-imagination of the image. (And here reemerges the word transfiguration in its current intricate but suggestive format: the imagination of the image). Loss of capacity and desire for illusion, disappointment and resentment with artistic traditions, short-reaching self-reference and irony: the list of the philosopher’s accusations against contemporary art is long and his reasons are arguable – but not to be ignored.

In his text, the philosopher seems not to believe in the possibility of art reactivating its potency of illusion, recovering its capacity of imagining the world and reestablishing a direct connection with life. To live above its means and beyond its ends, generating only simulacra, is this a definitive and final problem for current days art?

Not if the evidence is this installation by Regina Silveira. There is here a positive illusion of the world, as the philosopher wished – the illusion of a primitive scene, the allusion to an original scene, prior to the aesthetical issue and able to grant it a sound cause and meaning, a necessary condition for not restraining the use of the word art to a mere word play. This becomes even clearer when one hears from the artist, in her studio, the suggestion that Mil e um dias [A thousand and one days], the third station of her work – in the image of alternating days and nights with a soundtrack of noises both recovered and fabricated – carries an autobiographical aspect. But even unaware of such revelation by the artist, the primitive scene suggested by her is too strong to be ignored. And that is because the installation offers an effect of the world, prior to all intellectual interpretation that may be added to it and, specially, prior to the effect of discourse that fixes and asphyxiates much of both modern and contemporary art.

There is an effect of the world in this installation: this is the point. And, for several reasons, its piece of resistance is the central sky involving everything, the Entrecéu [Intersky]. It is grandiose, a dimension that becomes even more impressive after the smallness of the black well in the previous room, where we start the visit. Mirante [Looker], the black well of the previous room, in its ambiguous allusion to both those who see in it and those who are seen by it, is intimate and personal and suggests more than proposes. The intersky is ample, collective and affirmative and installs us in the present time – real, localized and immediate – proposed by the work, in a relation soon to be corrected by the wall of Mil e um dias [A thousand and one days]: in front of it we feel the urge of not being constrained by the immediate present created by the intersky and we are invited to return to what we have seen before in the first room in order to take on from there toward that which is now suggested by the image in the wall in front of us. As it is characteristic of many a contemporary art, the final meaning that may be reached by the visitor derives from and depends on the itinerary that the work proposes. When entering the venue, we do not know yet how decisive it will be to proceed according the proposed itinerary, but we will be impelled to do so and this will allow us the possibility – if there is a will to that – of overcoming the situation of simply having one’s senses affected by the experience we may have in each room, in each of the installation’s stations, and draw a broader meaning for our experience.

The intersky is grandiose in the sense this category has in classical aesthetics. If the grandiose does not necessarily call for the sublime, it may, under special conditions, touch the sublime, that which is absolutely grand (Kant), that which is not immeasurable, that which has itself as the measure of itself. The physical dimension is determining, but not essential. It is possible to reach the sublime through the immeasurably grand (a pyramid) and the infinitely small (Caspar David Friedrich). Both alternatives aim to present that which is not representable, to point at that which is not there, that which cannot be seen and that is not summarized by what is seen. Just like in this installation.

This process has a name, a name cherished by the philosopher and with which we return to our starting point: transfiguration (a word he nevertheless uses only once in his essay – but enough to caught an attentive reader). I’m looking at an image, but that which I’m actually seeing is not in it, it is quite beyond it: transfiguration. The capacity of imagination of the image. Something not all art has or looks for. A passage toward something that is not in the thing represented, not in the object, not in nature – not in this sky – but within the observer himself, in us, as pure concept.

And, nevertheless… there is something in this installation that depends on nature, something that depends on the sensitive, on the real, on the external, which means to say that – somehow – there is in this installation an external measurement after all: the body, the human body. The issue here is not just a matter of seeing; it is a matter of being, that which only a body can do, that which only the awareness of being inside a body can allow. Once again, the main clue – if it was necessary – comes from the backstage, from an inside information: the artist’s studio. In the maquette she made to visualize her own work (but that the public will never know) it is possible to see a miniature human figure; a miniscule human figure in scale marking the measurement and conveying the meaning of the measurement. This little human figure is placed at times beside the intimate well it looks at, at times in the intersky and at times in front of the thousand and one days: the artist moves it around the maquette when she needs to evaluate a feature, to imagine a solution, to sense the whole. This is not a work made for a mechanical or virtual observer, it makes no sense in a photography reproducing it: it only exists in that specific space and for someone who is really there. But this inside information is not indispensable for realizing the presence of this measurement, for understanding that the artist took the physical human body into consideration: the installation beckons the human body because it is an itinerary that involves it, its meaning is the result of the real movement of a concrete body through a sensitive space. This work is done for human scale. The intimate well meets such demand, and the intersky confirms and reaffirms it. It is perhaps in the thousand and one days only that a door is opened for the disappearance of this body – after it has been affirmed.

All this puts transfiguration in motion, including in its specific and archaic and mystical sense, which perhaps is inherent to art: the revelation of an inner image of the work, greater than the outer image and that, nevertheless, magnifies it. An inner image that lies in the observer. There is, for sure, matter for imagination in this installation. Its image imagines. The positive illusion the philosopher searched for still exists.

Footnote
¹BAUDRILLARD, Jean. El complot del arte (ilusión y desilusión estéticas). Buenos Aires: Amorrortu, 2006.

ENTREIMAGENS [INTERIMAGES]

ADOLFO MONTEJO NAVAS

"The hypothesis of a simulacrum would merit more than just becoming reality."
(Jean Baudrillard)

There is no doubt whatsoever that Regina Silveira’s choice of Ficções [Fictions] as the title for the exhibition at the former Nolasco station, now the Museu Vale do Rio Doce (MVRD) in Vila Velha, Vitória, is open recognition of a fundamental component of her poetic, which is entwined in her esthetic discourse; but that perhaps in the past few years has been made denser, or is becoming more explicit, as a conceptual and structural characteristic that inhabits her work one way or the other. Mostly, this occurs when it communicates with Jorge Luis Borges’ work of 1944, whose tonal coincidence is very much more a declaration of poetic, artistic faith, moving in the direction of belief in fiction as a "report" about what is real – in favor of its inclusion without limitations – because both reality as well as unreality are part of the same enigma in which the human being and the universe are reciprocally implicated. But it also deals with a morphological, operative aspect because this is what artistic construction is about: a fictional architecture. Even more so when Regina Silveira bases the major part of her latest work on this frontier territory that is involved with architecture – site specific and work for public spaces. Thus, and following the reading of these same paths that can split, for their part, into different directions, our first critical approximation could choose the path of spatial intervention and its topographical dimensions; or the path of fiction, that is, invention, which also corresponds to the field of simulacrum, such as those distorted and interpretive configurations that read the apparent forms of visual world.

This exhibition is related to a type of simulacrum, which guarantees for art its fictional, anti-platonic condition for registering what does not exist – pushing aside mimicry – conceding an ambiguous nature between the real and the more constructed phantasmagoria, in a poetic of entreimagens [interimages], of images that dislocate to an interregnum zone, such as that of its deepest nature. Jean Baudrillard has emphatically called attention to this image stage in contemporary society, in which transparency is purged of any other mystery to be unveiled and where the abandonment of esthetic illusion configures a desolating panorama. Within this context his question resonates: "Will there still be, within the hyper-visibility of the things, of their transparency, of their virtuality, a place for an image, a place for an enigma, a place for occurrences of perception – new occurrences of perception – a place for an elective force of illusion, for a true strategy of forms and appearances?" For our luck, the answer to this difficult situation is positive. It is in this, the exhibition site and, by extension, in the artist’s own poetic. Thus, this so saturated critical picture in no way coincides with strategies of the artist, to the extent that Regina Silveira precisely establishes a visual simulacrum and a doubly reflexive esthetic illusion: at the threshold where the image makes a crisis of itself – visual interrogation and neither code nor imagetic servitude. In fact, the full body of work of the artist defends this critical condition of thinking of another image, seeking esthetic-poetic situations that produce a cognitive state associated with enlightenment and visual magic. In fact, if the word fictions is part of the artist’s reflexive vocabulary, it is because it translates the poetic type of situations, those executed as visual de-constructions (architectural, spatial), with virtual procedures (different types of artifices and simulations). All in order to bet even more on the creation of an ambivalent interimage: enigmatic and, at the same time, a critical incorporated latency.

It is not in vain that the Simulacrum concept already is part of the artist’s trajectory, both as exhibition and concern. In the exhibit of the same name in 1984, she signaled a direction towards the " (…) terrain of paradoxical extensions of Perspective, the place where the transgression of the norms provides free transit to the deforming properties of the projective systems, frankly opposite her presuppositions of fidelity to visual perception" (following words of the artist in step with her doctoral thesis), which reaches right up until today. At the time, the artist’s investigative research into Leonardo da Vinci’s Windsor notebooks already had revealed attention to the simulacrums, the visual experiences deriving from the translation of the physicality of some phenomena.

In any case, this is far from the simulationists – American artists who based their work on the theses of the French thinker, to his ironic astonishment – who worked with visual references in a high state of recycling; a new statute of the copy, with reversible simulation of reality in a stage of seduction where the forms/fetishes were disillusioned. In fact, the artist’s poetic is inserted into another problem, and it is precisely its distance from the mystifying of the original and the copy – both derived from the work’s aura – that confers on it a post-Benjamin freedom that is in no way contemptible. Thus, the visual frequency of Regina Silveira’s work is in tune with the demystifying of the classical supports, through the incorporation of materials and procedures of the contemporary visual industry and technology, in greater symbolic affinity than that which has been polarized by the history of the aura and what derives from the reproductions. Her work moved so close to the dilemma that it wound up demonstrating its inexistence. Her poetic focuses on this lack of definition, and shows the reproduction-original conversion, and vice-versa, as being fruitful, pertinent, plugged-in to the times we are living. In any case, the artist’s insistence in creating a third border for the image passes by not reducing fiction to fictitious, into mere subverted iconography (distant from the more common post-modern appropriationism and its frivolous theft of icons), and by succeeding in achieving reproduction/representation equidistance.

All of Regina Silveira’s poetic can be considered in this interval contexture, into which even the title Entrecéu [Intersky] (the central intervention in this Museum) is a manifest example. Operation and esthetic results that deal with the interstice caused by the conceptual/visual dislocation of contemporary art: where the image that is worked is distinctive from any visual reification project, to achieve a desired state of visual alteration – "the other of image", as Eliane Escoubas said. Which is another Borges-allied conditioning factor: one thinks about the models and the originals, denouncing this lack of variations, inversions and constructions that play with the presence/absence perceived references of perception (Dilatáveis, 1981/1991, and Masterpieces, 1983/1998, were emblematic series produced by the artist), never the descending into absolutism of permanent forms, a precise product or tautological object (the artist’s works have this degree of suspension, of not being components, as well as a major part of the in situ works play with their dematerialization), neither in that other set of ideas comprising communication, the belief in transparency of the message, two dangers raised by Mário Perniola, two vain illusions, merely semi-alive within their gradual impoverishment, by the continuous and circular multiplying of the inertia that represents all of the cultural mimetic machine. Regina Silveira’s work, paradoxically, is able to disentangle itself from the illusionist works that practice their own disillusionment, offering figurations whose performances upon appearances is to create other simulations, a certain demystification of what the image presents.

Thus, it represents a manifest, even arbitrary artificiality regarding visual canons (with linear perspective rules, the theory of shadows or the generic separation of languages), whose objective is to reach the other visual topology. At the beginning of her career, such experiences were located in interior, environmental spaces, pushing the representational virtuality of the white cube to its limits. However, for over a decade she has been involved with larger structures, buildings and other public spaces, both to checkmate the stable condition of architecture (of buildings and monuments) or their museographic institutional meaning, as well as to institute new perceptive experiences (and Ficções [Fictions] is part of this amplified coordinate). Lately, the spatial and architectural deconstruction processes have been incremented, and in this sense the Ficções [Fictions] exhibition (2007) seems to be a part of a same field of interests, with different results in Claraluz (2003) and Lumen (2005), in view of the fact that all of the cases a strict relationship of light with architecture has been established through great spatial defragmentation, and an operation of visual links inside and outside of the buildings.

III

From the simulacra of the visuality, of which the quatroccento Italian master warned, to the hypervisibility and transparency simulacra, there is a quantum leap to be considered. It is a mandatory recontextualization because the former work at the level of the eye like a camera obscura/interior, as images/simulacra that are appearances of visuality, apparent forms of appearances. Projected images of a phenomenonic world like ghostly bodies for Leonardo da Vinci. The most recent ones – those formulated through the French theorist – are those simulacra that play with the trend toward denotation and connotation at the same time, equating even their indefinition. They belong to the post-modern era: one era of simulation in which the confusion between the real and the model already is confirmed, promulgated, being now the production of the real, of additions to the real, the devouring strategy that dominates almost everything (media, advertising, TV...). In the search for abolishing the distance that still exists between the real and its representation, the strategies of art (and those of the Brazilian artist) still offer a way out, a visual, polyglot, critical antidote. Regina Silveira’s poetic knows how to position itself against the coalescence of the real and its double, between the real and the esthetic configuration, inventing its own territory for action and observation through a legacy of constructive mechanisms, according to the artist herself, where parody-like and artificial distortions are inserted; Altogether, a visual opacity that is being transformed into configurations of light and transparencies, with the same critical destination, always putting fidelity and representational literalness in play. In this regard, Entrecéu [Intersky], Mirante [Looker], Mil e Um Dias [A Thousand and One Days] present a common sense of the abyss, that which leads us to doubt what we see, of its legitimizing visual truth, by the strength of its constructed poetic latency.

"Art is made to continue being illusion: if one enters the dominion of reality, we are lost." Art is condemned to defend, more than ever, its simulation space. Or better, its reason for simulation. Understanding that its fiction is different, a construction made to veil) the dis-appearances of truth. That is where comes the elevated and fruitful tension between reproduction and representation that has existed in Regina Silveira’s work since the beginning, as well as that which is produced as a consequence between representation and understanding. Two productive binomials that also repose in a repertoire of long-reach concerns: the re-positioning of our space-time coordinates – so visible in Ficções [Fictions] – the place of the subjectivity of the existential and even cosmological panorama of the beginnings of the XXI century, as well as in the registration/preparation of the interrogations belong into (or coming from) the poiesis order: its forms never run out in themselves, which is part of a seduction – shall we say even humanistic – that bets on its conquered collective presence.

Despite the fact that this exhibition does not follow a defined script, being able to yield to the three works that independently comprise it, nevertheless there is a more plausible itinerary, that which began with Mirante [Looker], in the first space of this nave that is this Museum/warehouse.

Mirante [Looker] presents an imaginary situation of its own, that of the creation inside another space, and that of a pure image whose translation is abyssal. Through the installation of a well that permits a planetary view it is possible to conduct a reading of our space located in the Museum (in the Center of the nave) that offers an undeniable cosmological position. Contrary to the installation, Entrecéu [Intersky], the larger intervention in this exhibition that presents a large-scale and very involving sensorial/visual situation, Mirante [Looker] points toward a focused objective, funneling our approximation in nearly a subjective, intimate manner. In fact, it is a true cosmological tête-à-tête, of a rare work of art whose sense is collective (from spiritual kinships and directly descending from Observatório [Observatory], 2006) demanding our strict participation; an invitation to find our image mirrored in a wandering planet. Thus the subjective space cannot remain untouched through this play of perception in which the universe is contemplated within a well, because at the bottom of this mirage, a vertigo crosses the site, the building.

On the other hand, the artist knew to choose an element of great symbolic significance for all cultures, because a well is invested with cosmic communication as a result of its function as a nexus with the "floors of the world". "And considered upside down, it is a gigantic astronomical telescope pointed from the guts of the world to the celestial pole". And this inversion is meaningful because it places us in the situation of being observed and not only observing. Thus, it is a work that includes us in its elaborated microcosmic and that encompasses abyss and communication. At the same time, it also drags with it the connotation of a secret, of dissimulation, and it is a symbol of knowledge.

Entrecéu [Intersky] offers the notion of such an important interval in its own title: it is the title of a situation and of the nature of its images. Entrecéu [Intersky] creates entreimagens [interimages], nourishes a visual condition that uses the interruption, an in-between space that already contemplates the passage: images of a space to be located in another one. It is unknown territory, despite the high points of reference (the sky, the clouds). In fact, the distinctive mirroring of the sky in the space of this Museum is a feature of the exhibit, as much as the uprooting it promotes, a gesture of spatial perforation that makes it possible to glimpse a place inside another.

Entrecéu [Intersky] not only works the multiplied perspective of the deconstructed space, but also makes it possible for visitors to insert themselves into a visual operation in which the architecture presents itself as the subject, although it can undergo esthetic transformation. The space needs to be approached in a confrontation with its architecture and specificity, a type of discussion always present in site specific exhibits. Here, the space in the main warehouse is contemplated to be invaded by the reading of the exterior space: the sky and the clouds are inside. Captured? Or was the structure of the building raised, imploded? In fact, the sky has been resized through architectural syntax, with the observed and even accidental characteristics of the warehouse interior, where the inclination of the graphic structure itself on the lateral walls makes it possible to have one more dynamic element of greater tension within the nave, a density that is nearly of movement, a sign of visual fragmentation that receives the entire building and in which we are involved.

What is produced in Entrecéu [Intersky] is an unusual situation, of apparition (a fundamental word in the artist’s vocabulary, as is magic). It is an esthetic fiction that reports another imaginary occurrence, but one in which what is "reported" is yet another poetic situation – of concentrated imaginative cognition – rather than a long or discursive narrative. And something that has a strong allegorical component; that is, it produces a migration of meanings, because the condition of the image is to convert itself into something else: in the appropriation and reading of Entrecéu [Intersky], the MVRD building speaks about the sky and vice-versa. The operation of changing the central visual axis of the warehouse architecture leads to the realization of a surprising celestial tunnel, where the structure of the nave that has no real roof serves neither for shelter nor separation, but rather for a sought after visual osmosis. And once again the external and internal boundaries are indivisible, which is in line with our modus vivendi, completely interpenetrated by the mediatic habitat. And in this environment, through a multi-focal and circular view of things, our rotational walk, our steps are joined together in a sensorial, synthesizing contiguousness, which is fundamental for reception of the piece.

Mil e Um Dias [A Thousand and One Days] – or the days of the night – is an image-movement that seems to go against image-time in a statute of the work that touches the sequential condition. The situation created, of a visual sinkhole, is somehow in step with Mirante [Looker] even if what is funneled through Mirante [Looker] is hyperbolized in Mil e Um Dias [A Thousand and One Days]. In fact, in both of these pieces what is being played is the condition of the image in movement. Movement that is inscribed in a space, made up of space-time appropriations. This places it as being characteristic of a piece in transit, which works succession, another type of less territorialized space. Certainly, in Ficções [Fictions] an instigating situation is produced, with specific interventions in the Museum’s space, satisfying a given site, but at the same time — and, above all, with Mil e Um Dias [A Thousand and One Days] and Mirante [Looker] – one sees them traversed by temporality, by an image in a state of flux. The space of these pieces seems modulated by the temporal presence that is not based on a static visual state but, rather, images-happenings.

If there is a certain tension in the expansion and contraction of the images that appear and disappear in continuous transformation, it is boosted by the presence of a hidden, camouflaged door, a replica of another one that exists at the extreme other side of the nave, which increases the fictional quality of the installation and places the representation scheme in even greater doubt (being here in subtle complicity with Magritte). Furthermore, the soundtrack (containing voices of children and the sound of wind in parity with the clouds, and crickets and night creatures intermittently with the stars) amplifies the condition of the piece: it offers a symbolic acoustic substance, put into dialogue with the silence of the images, also producing a strange sensation of something that cannot be observed, or of a life of memory (of echoes), and great daytime restlessness and rare nighttime serenity. The projection of passing clouds, the appearance of the stars, the light of day and the luster of the night – always on an almost cinematographic scale, on one of the walls in the back of the warehouse – is a continuous-motion image engine where the representation itself is underway, in transformation, via the respiration and dilatation of the images. There is a certain undeniable hypnotic effect in this visual genesis. It is a true esthetic ode created for our transit, for experience with a circularity that dilates and retracts in a kaleidoscopic configuration, which functions as a magic door where images are born and die without interruption, opening and closing our visual state.

In these three cases, the situation that characterizes the site specific is produced and redefines the notion of place: the piece is established as a place of spatial practices, such as production and place performances. And in this relationship between place and space, metaphorically read by Michel de Certau as the relation between the tongue and a word, the space that represents the site specific is the conjugation of place and, thus, the recovery of ambiguity, of a spatialpolissemic, far from its stability and unique identity. The three interventions realized by the artist are the result of this practice of a language that re-signifies the place. It is something that is completed through our presence, through our wandering through the space of the pieces.

Ficções [Fictions], taken together, raises questions built in the site specific environment (the characteristic art location promoted by the Museu Vale do Rio Doce) and is part of three different situations. The common denominator of the work is the sky, the celestial horizon by extension, and our own problematic scale, interrogated, with regard to the images that are presented. And such situations have something of optical duplication of what is real (via projection, via reflection via fragmentation), whether in the replicated door of Mil e Um Dias [A Thousand and One Days], in the multiplied sky as in a tunnel in Entrecéu [Intersky] or in the imaginary sphere in Mirante [Looker]. And through components that are recognizably immaterial (a light materical presence, even if physical) that reinforces this state of fiction, the intensity of the intrigue that is presented to us.

On the other hand, in this exhibition three types of strategies with lights are produced: there is a fixed light, stationary or objectualized (Entrecéu [Intersky]) and a projected light, virtual, in movement, sequential, which runs in parallel to us (Mil e Um Dias [A Thousand and One Days]), as well as a mixed case of nearly fixed and objectualized light that, however, moves slowly (Mirante [Looker]). This leads to three different viewing experiences, according to what is recorded on our perception: Entrecéu [Intersky] invites us to take a complete physical plunge, by passing our gaze over the full extension of the main of nave and looking mostly at the entire architectural structure (the high part, sides, the floor), from close up or in perspective, from many, always wide, angles and continuously; Mil e Um Dias [A Thousand and One Days] calls for a horizontal, parallel viewing, and Mirante [Looker] one looks downward, self-engrossed (paradoxically, cause the visual objective is the anonymous, but collective, sphere of our planet).

Ficções [Fictions] (2007), together with Claraluz (2003) and Lumen (2005), already form an emblematic trilogy in the career of the artist, in which space and light with incorporeal characteristics in their spatial configurations are the main elements for the creation of artwork-situations, for the images-events. A light that, different than previous work, is not centered on shadow strategies but rather on transparency operations, of celestial light reflected or multiplied in clusters/fragments of light that transform themselves. This is quite different than what Hal Foster calls "shadowing", or, more clearly the spectral side that certain contemporary art possesses. In this sense, Regina Silveira’s poetic is heading towards a completely opposite position manner, for example, that of Rachel Whitehead. Despite some things being interestingly in tune in the use of architecture and daily objects, or in the predilection for some brands/traces and common phantasmagorical results. Even despite the use of opaque and flat masses, of working with the negative side of the image, its emptiness, as well as with the weight that is inherent or latent in the memory of the things, in the British artist the sculptural volume reaches a physical, nearly monumental gravity, and there is a certain uneasiness that the Brazilian artist’s works prefer to show tangentially, obliquely. This is so in part because the re-semanticizing of the spaces is different, the negative of the spaces – and the objects in play – is something else. In the case of Regina Silveira, the objective is to create a question mark, cognitive and perceptive questioning whose essence is poetic, a visual/spatial enigma that especially shows itself as almost transparent, naked and not impenetrable, as happens ion Whitehead’s work. Deep down, it is curious to perceive that the same solidity of some of the spatial creations (as also is the case of Ficções [Fictions]) is suspended, and shows its markedly fictional side.

With the nomination of entreimagens [interimages], we intend to make a reference to different visual intermezzo environments: to the diffuse boundary between reality and representation (this later considered as a phantasmagoria, as a ghostly truth), to the gap that reconnects what is virtual with what is real (in a joining together of forces), as well as to the state of visual interstices that pursue this type of images-nexus (eliminating surfaces/volumes, interiors/exteriors, spaces/movements). Such a category has been validating, above all, the threshold condition that it carries off by itself. These are threshold-images that are seeking immaterial, nearly incorporeal constructions, and are located within a context of high physical and environmental definition (buildings, public spaces, urban topology), whose function winds up being the search for a new visual statute.

In fact, added to the reflection produced by the dislocation of attributes from one media to another, and the imagetic estrangement that always results, is an investigation of the perception, of the representation scheme. Thus, Ficções [Fictions] carries a meta-poetic condition in which the question of art is inevitable: regarding its place and value, about its pertinence and language – a questioning of the art that is part of the amplified field of our culture. And it is in this stage that Ficções [Fictions] places itself: it is not only an artistic exhibition but a higher order exhibit, whose esthetic characteristics are re-dimensioned in the light of new meanings. Really, the exhibition understands how to deal with questions that inhabit our contemporary lives, the relationship with the cosmos, with time – in sum, with our space-time coordinates. It also is cosmologic vision that can only being offered through a means of intuitive understanding that de-conceptualizes the world through an esthetic experience that does not renounce its perceptive, sensorial and cognitive eros, and that is conscious of having a symbolic component that increasingly is more evident – that which promises an esthetic-social reading and reception that is more and more generous. Thus, it is difficult to remain apart in this exhibition: Ficções [Fictions] is intimately related to being near and distant from things.

On the other hand, the phantasmatic mark of imagetic conjuring that many of her previous pieces contained (in which the absences were more significant as esthetic signs than the presence itself) led to a result that was an ambiguous reference; that is, operative, underway, in critical-cultural litigation. Now, this phantasmagoria increasingly has been dislocated to two instances: to a different immateriality – thus the work with light (solidified as a vestige, an almost incorporeal trace); and to greater transparency, as if the artist’s focus had come closer to the kernel of the image, that is the nature of its fiction (recognized, strengthened illusion). And in the interventions in large spaces, this dynamic on immateriality and transparency also has revealed itself to be a paradoxical strategy, by the capacity to create situations of lightness, magic, imagetic suspension in closed contexts, heavy, of great physical presence, architectonic.

Just as the history of linear perspective already supposes a psycho-physiological re-education – destroying that which it represents (according to Mário Perniola) – it is interesting to note that the development of Regina Silveira’s language departing from her studies and visual deconstructions originated by illusionism of the perspective wind up being translated into spatial adventures in which the light/shadows intensely work another perception dynamic, because the site specific form acts on us through its dialogue of successive visions (the eye sums up perspectives, according to the artist), in a living, active manner. This is done through a mobility that demystifies the space as an equal, as permanent, where all of the points lead to different readings. The seeing and being in the pieces break the mechanics of the vision, of contemplation, of any horizon reduced to a unified representation, or a single approximation. Which is also related to the nature of an image that accepts temporality, succession, transit.

In this manner, the literalness of the images always is deflected, intervened, activated for another reading, one of great perceptive perplexity. Which has something in common with the irony of the representations, of the interpretations, about the polarity embedded in the game: representation versus understanding. In fact, all of Regina Silveira’s poetic makes this critical circumstance possible: that of moving our visual, cultural understanding to another level of representation. Thus, Ficções [Fictions] points towards another threshold, towards art’s very condition of being a threshold, the third border of the image. Or interimages.

Rio de Janeiro, June 2007.

¹In any case, besides the reference to the writer made by the artist (in implicit homage) in a part of the New York Public Library project (concretely, the construction of an imaginary ladder spatially connecting to the institution’s real ladder, to a certain labyrinthal similarity with the Borgiana Babelic library), makes references inevitable to some parallelisms in the esthetic concerns between the writer and the artist, in so much as imagetic speculation, attraction through reflections, inversions, other perspectives, the imaginative vertice so present or the potentializing of fable as critical and poetic reading Also, the poetic reinvention of the universe could figure as a common prerogative, as well as the appreciation of language paradoxes and games. The differences, numerous and significant, are not being called for here.
²BAUDRILLARD, Jean. La ilusión y la desilusión estéticas. Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1997. p. 28.
³SILVEIRA, Regina. Simulacros. São Paulo: MAC, nov./dec. 1984. [Folder].
⁴ESCOUBAS, Eliane. Esboço de uma ontologia da imagem e de uma estética nas artes contemporâneas. Vitória: Seminários Internacionais de Arte Vale do Rio Doce, 2007. p. 33.
⁵Computer simulations for certain works (digital models, etc.) is a common practice, fully incorporated into the artist’s work.
⁶BAUDRILLARD, Jean. La ilusión y la desilusión estéticas. Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1997. p. 51.
⁷CHEVALIER, Jean; GHEERBRANT (ver se tem esse E), Alain. Diccionário dos símbolos. Rio de Janeiro: Ed. José Olympo, 1997. p. 726-727.
⁸DE CERTAU, Michel. The practice of everyday life. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984 apud KAYE, Nick. Site specific art. London: Routledge, 2000. p. 3-7.
⁹It is a special (and spatial) practice of language that this poetic links to the imagetic liberties of poetry and, precisely because of this, moves beyond banal comparisons, of the similes that have been consecrated by the law of custom. Poiesis always exalted as artistic reason.
¹⁰A significant detail in the production of this visual quality is that all of the images in this exhibition have a manufacturing process similar to that used for advertising and the production of shows and events. Digital images, visual matrixes worked through electronic systems, industrial processes.
¹¹FOSTER, Hal. Diseño y delito y otras diatribas. Madrid: Ediciones Akal, 2004. p. 134.
¹²Something that, in fact, the models that are together with the documentation of the making of the installations in the Museum’s exhibition hall explain, not only in their plastic identity in the imaginary space, but also through the lack of difference between the projects that have been held or not held, for different reasons, since both are part of the results of research into the same poetic.
¹³PERNIOLA, Mário. Estética del siglo veinte. Madrid: Ed. La balsa de la medusa, 2001. p. 78.

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