2010 Signature Edition Series
Regina Silveira
Pendent (silhouette)
Edition Size: 50
Medium/description: Metal hook, vinyl cutout
Dimensions: 29 x 7 inches
Regina Silveira (Porto Alegre, Brazil, 1939) is one of Latin America’s leading artists, with an extensive career that spans more than three decades. Silveira’s oeuvre deals with how reality is represented, and the devices used to represent it. Light, shadows, marks, imprints, perspective grids, and deformations known as anamorphosis are characteristic of Silveira’s work. One recurring theme is the presence of shadows that seem to emanate from an absent object, or that contradict the object that produces them.
In her first works, Silveira overlaid shadows on other images creating signs that were paradoxical and undecipherable. Later, she used architecture itself as a support of the sign, removing its neutral character and imbuing it with a new, significant force. A third element in this game is the role of the viewer. By generating multiple perspectives and several vanishing points, the artist is able to destabilize privileged points of view, inviting the spectator to enter the work and introducing a temporal dimension into the experience, in which perception varies depending upon the viewer’s position with respect to the image. 
There is always tension in Regina’s works. In it coincides a rational desire to understand reality through classical systems of representation, and a surrealist impulse, leading us to the genealogical line that connects her through her master teacher Iberê Camargo to Giorgio De Chirico, who was Camargo’s mentor.
Pendent (silhouette) is a metal hook that projects its own shadow on the wall. But from the hook seems to hang an enigmatic, menacing object, which upon close scrutiny reveals itself as the deformed shadow of a corkscrew. The most common definition of shadow is “a partial absence of light caused by an illuminated body.” Nevertheless, perhaps few words contain such diverse meanings as the word “shadow”, literal or figuratively speaking: attenuated clarity; sign or marking; ghost or phantom; screen, trace or vestige; dream or apparition; a vague idea or notion that subtly 
insinuates something secret or mysterious.
Regina Silveira lives and works in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Read more about Regina Silveira's project for Philagrafika 2010 here.
For purchase information please contact: Rebecca Mott at rmott@philagrafika.org or call 215-701-8057.