Regina Silveira

In the shadow of the Brazilian military dictatorship, Silveira pursued an elusive art, by necessity and by design. Absence and isolation, illusion and distortion were not only promising artistic strategies, but also richly meaningful metaphors in an era of severe political repression. Silveira made Enigmas by photographing an object and carefully drawing an opaque mask over it during the exposure process. In the resulting images, the masks produce the illusion of shadows, absent of visible volumes from which they were cast, that loom large over each object.
Around this time, shadow (and its corollaries absence, trace, and afterimage) became an essential subject for Silveira, and she sought new alternatives to the rigid authority of a singular perspective. The incongruous pairings of mundane household objects with shapes that are more difficult to classify (and that are alternately menacing and harmless) hint at her fascination with Marcel Duchamp's Readymades.... Silveira's Enigmas deftly synthesize her fascination with the ancient art of skiagraphia (shadow painting) and anamorphosis (the distortion of a singular perspective captured from oblique angles) that would become central to her practice.