Regina Silveira - Off Scale

Luciana Brito Galeria presents Regina Silveira’s Offscale. In this solo exhibition, the artist shows the work Touch, an installation that continues, under new parameters, the handprint series that was part of her last solo show in São Paulo, Mundus Admirabilis e Outras Pragas, hosted in 2008 by the former Galeria Brito Cimino. The handprints have been part of the repertoire of indices used by the artist since the 70s. Even having exhibited extensively in Brazil and abroad in recent times, Regina Silveira hasn’t had a solo show in São Paulo for over five years.

The new installation Touch is seen right at the entrance of the gallery. In this work, Regina Silveira covers the main room with gigantic hands engraved on metal, arousing doubts in the perception and experience of space: What is off scale, the images or the spectators?

“The hands that cover the walls for the gallery are symbols of presence and identity that cover the walls of the gallery,” Silveira explains. While in the exhibition Mundus Admirabilis e Outras Pragas the handprints create metaphors capable of translating the Bible prophecies to pests of our times, in Touch they are associated with visual inventories of immemorial and ancestral symbolic significance, reaching other spheres of meaning.

Designed especially for large-scale projects related to various architectures, Touch was originally devised for the 2nd Biennial New Orleans (USA, 2010), which would cover a four-story abandoned building located in the downtown area, in the city still devastated by the Katrina hurricane that destroyed Southern United States in 2005. The installation as such was never set up.

As a derivation of Touch, the show also brings Dreamer, a set of crystal glasses portraying the same hand, but in actual size, enameled with graphic indices of the simple gesture of holding the cup, to address the relationship between sign and body.

Silhouetted hands with different gestures, many of them referring to art itself, have been recurring signs on Regina Silveira’s path. They are present in videos, books, and graphic works, dating from the 1970s to the present. Offscale shows some of these threads over time: from Digito, the animation on the first electronic billboard at Avenida São João, in São Paulo, in the early 1980s, until the most recent results of Classic, hand-carved marble, and the digital animation Una Vez Más.

As for the gallery II, Regina Silveira presents Dark Swamp (Nest), an installation that covers the entire space, in which a massive black egg is surrounded by a mandala of crocodiles. Still part of the imagery of Pragas (Plagues), this work addresses the power and evil—or the evil of power—as destiny or prophecy. The image of crocodiles—fragmented and multiplied in a chaotic way, along with the egg—wants to speak of contamination as unwanted pregnancy, which spreads as an uncontrollable stain, replicating itself in all directions. Just like Touch, Dark Swamp (Nest) reacts to the artist’s visit to New Orleans in 2010, when she planned alternatives for her participation in the 2nd Biennial—more specifically to the Cabildo Room (former seat of the government power during the Spanish colonization in Louisiana). Later, the work was shown in 2012 at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) in the exhibition Extrangerias, curated by Andrea Giunta and Nestor Canclini.

About the artist

1939, Porto Alegre, Brazil. Lives and works in São Paulo.

Regina Silveira is undoubtedly one of the most important names in Latin America’s contemporary art. Famous for her experiments with light and shadow, the artist intentionally works distorted images that insinuate emotional and sensory elements.

Among the institutions where the artist has recently shown are Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (São Paulo, Brazil), 2008; Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), 2009; Køge Art Museum (Denmark), 2010; Atlas Sztuki Foundation (Lódz, Poland), 2010; MASP (São Paulo, Brazil), 2011; Instituto Itaú Cultural (São Paulo, Brazil), 2010; Fundação Iberê Camargo (Porto Alegre, Brasil), 2011; The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art (Connecticut, USA), 2012. She has also participated in group shows at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo (Seville, Spain), 2009; Siegen Art Museum (Germany), 2009; MUAC (Mexico), 2012; Somerset House (London, England), 2012; Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (São Paulo, Brazil), 2012. She has also featured as guest artist at the Philagrafika (Philadelphia, USA), 2010; the Mercosul Biennial (Porto Alegre, Brazil), 2011, as well as the Mediations Biennial (Poznan, Poland), 2012.