Reviews
Beyond the white cube
Adolfo Montejo Navas
Collaborating for the transition from an art of space to a more temporalized art of yet-to-come is an instigating current practice, especially when it is known that our habitat has changed as much as our perceptions. This is a new visuality regime, and in this changing context we enroll Regina Silveira's poetics finds, as today she is possibly the artist who brings most assertively and with most frequency such aesthetic problematic into her work. “Outside art's protected spaces, it is the transforming power of art which has been into function with double strength, whenever it provides new experiences into reality and is able to replace an indifferent gaze with a more curious, participative attitude”, says the artist. This change encompasses a whole trend of her works, which is linked to architectonic spaces (inner spaces first, followed by threshold places and then unequivocally external areas, interchanged over time as if they were different researches), for they already configure as space - temporalized in situ which include this contaminated flow of plural contacts and records which the city produces.
If by Renaissance it was demanded by Vitruvius that among other knowledge, one should “know how to read the stars and be familiar with the heavenly system”, it is coincidental that over the last years the artist has been mapping a visual cosmology where we are inserted as dwellers, yet bewildered by our look. The increasing presence of the sky, the heavenly universe, of light as a horizon is not exempted from an allegoric component (vast in significance). Concurrently to that circumstance, the game of linking virtual visuality as fiction, sometimes bodiless, to spatial contexts of vast materiality grows in Regina Silveira's poetics, thus causing a feeling of lightness and dense material vibration at the same time. It is a paradoxical reality that lies on the image paradox itself, its always expanded effects, even more when the device of replicating reality (doubly dubious) creates an explicit illusionism and, consequently, a hanging visuality. When the device of replicating reality (doubly dubious) creates an explicit illusionism and, consequently, a hanging visuality.
About Stopping and then fading away
Teixeira Coelho, chief curator
There are a number of skies today, in art. There has always been, in the history of art. Today, there are maybe even more - and as central characters of the story, not just like supporting characters of someone else's or something's else story anymore. It wouldn't be hard to carry out a study on the reasons for this tendency. But why, now, an embroidered sky, a sky which is therefore twice as evident? Maybe because in São Paulo the sky is never visible, even though it is there. On arriving in São Paulo by plane, the sky is a brown-yellow bar weighing down over the city and cancelling the true sky. In Congonhas, a long time ago, on the dome over the internal lobby which distributes people to their destinations, there was a painted sky, a “realistic” one. Congonhas is the roof of São Paulo, Congonhas is already the sky of São Paulo - but in Congonhas also it was necessary to have another sky opening a false hole to the real sky that the planes tear through all the time. Maybe a number of skies are needed in São Paulo, a number of skies over São Paulo. The sky of São Paulo has a history, which now includes this one also.
Regina Silveira has done many skies. Interior ones, like in the Museu Vale, in Vitória; and exterior ones, such as the one for a New York library (which has not yet been installed). Interior ones, like in the Pinacoteca, quite recently. Exterior ones, such as this one now in the MASP, enormous, enthralling. Regina worked for a long time in black&white, with dark shades, often threatening. Now she calls on skies, blues&whites.
Her tone, in this case, is that of public art, urban art as it is also called, in a somewhat twisted way perhaps (art is always urban or it is not). As São Paulo is still very ugly, with a hasty type of architecture, dashed off, packed, squashed, piled up, in a crammed setting, public art should be a permanent resource. It still isn't. Regina Silveira has dedicated herself to this genre for a long time, possibly more abroad, where the receptivity and awareness of this need are more intense. Even so, some will remember a '”stampede” that she applied to the facade of the Bienal, a few years ago, and other installations or “walking-by” (with projections) less or more provisional through the streets of the city. Abroad, two cases stand out: the facade of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, in Taiwan, and the Palácio de Cristal in Madrid, anthological in her personal history.
Regina Silveira's is a singular art. It is not hard to understand it - contrary to many others who still insist on rarefied meanings. Yet, she is all too sophisticated in her resources and effects. An embroidered sky could point towards the option for a “gender art”, as we euphemistically say today instead of emphasizing what is behind this word: an art of a sex, an art with a sex. The sky is embroidered, therefore, according to the established code, it would be a feminine sky, an anti-feminist or post-feminist one, depending on the interpretation. It is an embroidered sky, a sky that needs to be stuck to a façade that has never served art as much as now. The sky in São Paulo evades the eye, therefore the body, with frightening speed: this one will stay parked for some time at the MASP. With it, time will also stay still, as will those who want to appreciate it. A token of contemporary art that is contrary to the flow of things, a contemporary art that opens to another state of the things. And yet a contemporary art that will soon disappear from this façade itself - a work of art which accepts to disappear. The eternal precariousness of the skies meets the transitory nature of today's art, in a provisional harmony.
Images
- abyssal .
- a lição .
- claraluz .
- derrapagem .
- desaparências .
- ficções .
- glossrio .
- gravuras/grafias .
- in situ .
- in situ 2 .
- linha de sombra .
- lumen .
- mundus admirabilis .
- mundus admirabilis e outras pragas .
- observatório .
- ocupação .
- philagrafika .
- porcelanas .
- projeções .
- silhuetas .
- sombra luminosa .
- tramazul .
- trilhas/tracks .
- tropel (reversed) .
- uma .