Mirrors of the Sky

God gave danger and the abyss to the sea,

Yet made it the mirror of the sky.

Fernando Pessoa

The work of every great artist is dangerous. Dangerous to those who interact with it — the gallery that exhibits it and the craftspeople who carry out the basic tasks commissioned by the artist — to critics, uncertain of the value of what has been presented to them, and to the public, which does not know how to respond to something that displays none of the customary signs of artistry and suspects that, in the end, everything is directed against it. Such work is dangerous above all to the artists themselves: what they do threatens their own expression, their ability to execute a work as planned and their recognition by others. Such work presents a universal danger.

Regina Silveira’s extraordinary radicalism manifests itself in three fundamental features of her practice. First, at a time when it is proclaimed that everything is art, Regina Silveira remains attached to some of the most basic principles of traditional art: know-how, the laborious requirement that everything occupy its proper place, and the precise calculation of effects.

Second, it appears in her commitment to the narrative contained within the artistic tradition from which she draws certain techniques: perspective, which she reinvents; anamorphosis, used on a magnified scale; and several fundamental subjects — the easel, the artist’s studio, geometric solids taken from the first lessons in painting and important works by celebrated artists.

Third, it lies in her decision to revise completely the ways in which those subjects and techniques are used and represented.

Regina Silveira rejects the banalities and routines into which part of contemporary art has fallen: readily executable plans of action, common above all in installations and performance; literal representation, as in photography’s excessively servile realism; or, conversely, deliberate uncertainty about what constitutes the work, as in those forms of Conceptualism whose first and only audience is the artist or a group of curators. Regina Silveira takes significant features of such contemporary art and pushes them to an extreme. Above all, however, she does not address her work to a particular audience — the weakest and at the same time most common pretext for making today’s art, or what is supposed to be art.

In the artist’s own words, her chosen “battlefield” is the mode of representation, with all its limitations and possibilities. This does not mean, however, that her work is imprisoned within the narrow confines of an art that speaks only about art. The external world also enters her works: the world of ordinary people and everyday objects, the artificial world made by human beings, and the history of the place in which the art is produced.

The objects in this world that the artist “takes possession of” may be an enormous monument or a sculptural group by a Brazilian modernist, an insignificant ladder or swimming pool, a tiny fly or an iconic work by the father of modern art. Her permanent “territory” is metaphysics — a difficult realm in which taking risks suits no one — but also the most prosaic irony. Almost invariably, these two “themes” contend for primacy within a single work. Once again, this disturbs the composure of the public, dealers and critics. The overwhelming majority of contemporary visual art is in fact too small or too terse, even when large in scale, and made too hastily to contain more than one aesthetic category, let alone several categories accumulating antagonistic tones. Today, such a multiplicity of nuances is encountered far more often in literature or cinema. Yet it can be found, both historically and now, in the “dangerous” work of an artist.

In Regina Silveira’s case, there is not always an enduring object left behind as the aesthetic outcome of her labour. Her chosen material may equally well be a worthless object discarded when the work is removed from a site; a perhaps more commonly used layer of paint covering floors and walls, later painted over; or vinyl that is cut and affixed, then peeled away and destroyed. There is a physical instability in her practice — at times one purchases from her only a CD-ROM containing instructions for producing and installing the work — and consequently her works will be chosen only by someone entirely confident in her actions, within a scenario still dominated by traditional markers of value such as canvas, the permanent object and fine materials.

Regina Silveira is exacting in her demands upon aesthetic values — values which are simultaneously subjected to continual trial, above all by the artist herself.

By accepting every risk, and especially that of finding herself alone on her chosen path, Regina Silveira has defined a place for her art first on a national and now on a global scale — one befitting an artist who, like every great creator, boldly seeks to fill the world with her works.

translated into Polish by Agata Mendrychowska