This text summarizes artist Regina Silveira’s position in a debate held at the Galeria São Paulo in December 1981 on the state of printmaking in Brazil in the early eighties. Early on, Silveira asserts that in her view, the idea that printmaking could effect a “democratization” of culture is a fallacy. There is no such thing as “democratic art,” she states, insofar as the relationship between printmaking and the art market is central to the medium and to debate. Her criticism is aimed specifically at the fact that contemporary Brazilian printmakers are overly concerned with craft, technique, and the tools and instruments specific to the medium to the detriment of the artistic idea and “the message to be communicated.” On the basis of the “specificity” of printmaking, which is bound to the visual and to reproducibility, Silveira underscores a sort of “conceptual gap” between graphic work and other art forms. Silveira comments on the 1980 edition of the book Panorama do Desenho e da Gravura, published by the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM-SP). In that book, as well as the exhibition it accompanied, “illustration” and an “anecdotal and historicist” strain of Surrealism prevail to give shape to a “mask for academic representation.”

Regina Silveira (b. 1939) began her career in the sixties as a painter, printmaker, and draftsman based in Porto Alegre, the capital of the state of Rio Grande do Sul. Following a trip to Europe, her work demonstrated an interest in the possibilities of geometric shapes and how they act on space. While teaching in Puerto Rico in 1969, her work appeared to be torn between craft and modern means of mechanical reproduction. While on the island, she became deeply involved in the phenomenon called the “dematerialization” of the object. She settled in São Paulo when she returned to Brazil in 1973. In the seventies, she produced major series of works, such as Destruturas Urbanas [Urban Destructures], Executivas [Executives] and Brazil Today, which make use of books, albums, and similar formats to address the issues of the environment, bureaucracy, and power. 

In addition to Silveira, participants in the debate on printmaking that took place on December 3, 1981, at the Galeria São Paulo included art critics Ronaldo Brito, Olívio Tavares de Araújo, Paulo Sérgio Duarte, and Luiz Seráphico. In the debate, Silveira, who had studied printmaking in the sixties in her native Porto Alegre with masters Francisco Stockinger and Marcelo Grassmann, asserts that contemporary Brazilian printmaking is “antiquated”; it fails to engage the means of production available at the time and it is overly concerned with audience reception and with the art market. The artist further asserts that the problems of illustration, craft, and a lack of poetics are not limited to the medium of printmaking, but affect all artistic media. Silveira advocates “a reversal of language” and calls on all artists—whether painters, printmakers, or sculptors—to engage in a questioning of supports. Silveira states outright that the position she expresses in the debate is in no way innocent or uninformed. She is instead “speaking from deep within,” as someone who works in the medium of printmaking, and as a participant, much to her chagrin, in the 1980 edition of Panorama do MAM. As a professor at Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado (FAAP) in São Paulo, Silveira sees herself as contributing as well to the “deformation of teaching” of the visual arts in Brazil.