In this essay, Walter Zanini focuses on the work of Regina Silveira, which he describes as process-work based on a poetic idea outlined with strict constructive resources. The critic and curator identifies three fundamental characteristics in her art: a firm control of space, her graceful drawing, and the care that is evident in her technical solutions that aim for a manual and technical symbiosis as regards procedures. He also notices the qualitative value that grants her the semiological awareness that characterizes the experimental nature of multimedia. Since this artist is mainly concerned with graphic projects, her works are mixed, temporal discourses that use text, performance, and/or video tape, which are more appropriate for free and open communication. In Zanini’s opinion, these “art games” encourage the viewer’s participation while the artist analyzes a number of visual language codes, using and restructuring images that are common to the consumer society.   

This is the introductory essay for the exhibition of works by Regina Silveira (b. 1939) who, though living in São Paulo, returns to her native state, Rio Grande do Sul, to show her work. The exhibition includes a collection of work that she produced since the early 1970s, consisting of graphic additions to mass circulation images that the artist has appropriated and used for her own purposes such as, for example, postcards of São Paulo on which Silveira has drawn a roof-like structure to suggest a panicky feeling, pollution, or industrial smog as a statement about the environment.

Regina Silveira started her art career as a painter, printmaker, and draftswoman in the 1960s in Porto Alegre, the state capital. A trip to Europe sparked her interest in geometrical forms. When she worked as a teacher in Puerto Rico (1969), her work reflected her twin interests in handcrafts and in modern means for technical reproduction. During her time there, she also became profoundly interested in the so-called “de-materialization” of the object. Once back in Brazil (1973), she settled in São Paulo. During that decade she produced some remarkable series, such as Destruturas Urbanas, Executivas, and Brazil Today, which included books, albums, and other elements that refer to environmental issues, bureaucracy, and power. 

The art critic, historian, and curator Walter Zanini was one of the curators at the Primera Bienal de São Paulo (1951), and was also the first director at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea (affiliated to the USP), a post he held from 1963 to 1978, where he sought to promote the work of new artists and marginalized forms of artistic expression.