Timeline
an exhibition by Regina Silveira28.FEB.2026 — 09.MAY.2026
Poetics of Interference
by Isabella Lenzi
by Isabella Lenzi
Regina Silveira (Porto Alegre, Brazil, 1939) holds a significant place in the history of Latin American and international contemporary art since the late 1960s. Spanning more than five decades, her work has questioned systems of representation, technologies for the production and circulation of images, and the ideological devices that shape our perception of the world. Through appropriation, the distortion of perspective, the expansion of graphics into architectural space, and the pioneering use of technological media, her work has dismantled the modernist promise of visual objectivity. Yet despite the importance that Spain held at a decisive moment in her professional career and the role Madrid played in the radical transformation of her practice, she remains relatively unknown within Madrid’s cultural context. This exhibition not only updates ongoing themes and approaches in her work, but also restores a shared history that is essential to recall.
Back in 1967, the Brazilian artist arrived in Madrid on a scholarship from the Instituto de Cultura Hispánica in order to study at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. She had received rigorous training as a painter and engraver in Porto Alegre, south of the country, under the tutelage of the expressionist Iberê Camargo, and despite her young age, she had already established herself nationally. She has, however, mentioned on more than one occasion, that she found the academic environment in Madrid stifling and anachronistic, unable to respond to her interests at the time and the urgencies of the present. She enrolled in several courses at the Complutense University, but her most significant learning took place outside the classroom, through contact with a generation of artists and poets —Julio Plaza, Ángel Crespo, Manolo Calvo, among others— who were already experimenting with geometric abstraction, concrete poetry, expanded graphics, industrial reproduction systems and the shifts between word and image.
That trip was thus decisive. Painting ceased to be a self-sufficient horizon, and the image began to be understood as a field of poetic and political action. Between Madrid and her subsequent stay as a lecturer at the University of Puerto Rico (Mayagüez) between 1969 and 1973, Silveira became part of an international exchange network that included conceptual practices, alternative channels and the use of emerging technologies. These were years marked by long-standing dictatorships in Spain, Brazil and other Latin American countries, as well as the Vietnam War and a growing awareness of the fact that the circulation of images —in the press, on television, on postcards, in books—had become one of the main devices for constructing reality, and thus susceptible to critical analysis and reconfiguration through artistic operations.
From then on, appropriation for Silveira did not merely imply citing images, but rather intervening in them, sabotaging them, stretching them so as to reveal their ideological scaffolding and redistributing them through alternative, underground channels. In the 1970s, series such as Middle Class & Co. (1971–72), Destrutura urbana (1975–76) and Brazil Today (1977) made use of photographs extracted from the press and tourist postcards, modifying colours and scales and superimposing geometric patterns, axes of perspective or disruptive images to interfere with their reading. Images of crowds, cities, monuments, or ‘natural wonders’ of Brazil were trapped in grids that alluded to systems of control, information flows, and political and social hierarchies. The complacent and seemingly innocent tourist image thus revealed its status as an ideological device.
At la_oficina, this gesture reappears powerfully in São Paulo Turístico and Madrid Turístico (2025). The artist revisits the iconography of postcards to superimpose images of accumulation and collapse —mountains of scrap metal, stacked cars— onto recognisable urban icons. The aim is a twofold one: on the one hand, it reveals the extractivist, speculative and unequal violence that underpins the contemporary tourist narrative; on the other, it establishes a symbolic equivalence between cities that, from different latitudes, share an economy of the image based on the promise and concealment of reality. The appropriation in her work is neither nostalgic nor melancholic: it is a critical tool that dismantles the fetishism of the media image. In times of visual saturation and accelerated digital circulation, her method —intervening, disrupting, introducing anomalies— takes on renewed relevance. At the same time, these images evoke genocides, armed conflicts, and other forms of disaster linked to the disregard for natural and built heritage that dominate the flow of information today.
If we consider appropriation as a point of departure, shadows are another of the most persistent conceptual devices in her work. Since the late 1970s, Silveira has distorted, enlarged, and misaligned shadows until they become autonomous protagonists. In series such as Dilatáveis (1981), the figures of politicians, executives, and military officers cast aberrant, disproportionate shadows exceeding the size of the bodies that supposedly produce them. The shadow ceases to serve as an optical effect and instead becomes an incisive metaphor for the excessive expansion of power.
Among the works presented at la_oficina, pieces such as A Continência and Os Grandes, both from the Dilatáveis series, display tiny figures on the wall whose gestures —a military salute, men gathered in their suits— are transformed into gigantic black expanses. What is projected is not the body, but rather its desire for domination and the devastation that desire is capable of. The disproportion introduces a tension between scale and authority that destabilises any neutral reading.
This idea achieves particular intensity in pieces such as Encuentro (1991), where the shadows of objects do not correspond —at least formally— to the subjects that produce them, reinforcing precisely the idea of symbolic, camouflaged or hidden power and violence. Shadows invade the architectural space, altering the viewer’s perception, inviting them to rethink their physical and ideological position.
Yet shadows in Silveira’s work do not arise solely from the iconography of power, but rather, and originally, from a quieter —and perhaps more radical— exercise in perceptual misalignment. In Anamorfas (1979), the artist experiments with this distortion of the gaze making use of domestic objects —utensils, minor forms, everyday presences— turning them into sources of an opaque threat. The shadow emancipates itself, goes astray, becomes suspicious, destabilising the relationship between object, projection and truth. This point of departure is decisive, in order to understand the subsequent development of works such as Símile, Enigma and Vestígia. By drawing on the domestic sphere as a triggering factor, she also introduces, in a non-explicit but persistent way, a feminist critique: home not as a refuge, but as a place of confinement, discipline, repetition, and hierarchy; a setting where the ordinary can become sinister and where shadows reveal —rather than obscuring—an economy of gestures and tasks that have historically been rendered invisible.
Since the late 1980s, Silveira has expanded her graphic practice into architectural and urban spaces, creating interventions that respond to specific buildings and places, transforming viewers’ experiences. For the artist, it is essential to leave institutional frameworks and art circuits behind and engage directly with the wider public. In Lumen (2005), her installation at the Palacio de Cristal of the Reina Sofía Museum, the transparency and light of the historicist building —linked to a colonial past that is still active— amplified the interplay between illusion and materiality, turning the space into a territory of ghostly presences. In La oficina’s space, on the other hand, the intimate scale of the gallery allows for a more concentrated, almost physical contact with the shadows. The architecture reveals itself, beyond the white cube, as an active interlocutor.
Through shadows, Silveira challenges the notion of accurate representation. Perspective, a system that was supposed to provide a scientific translation of reality, appears to be, after all, a historical convention and ideological construct. In the absence of a reference point, or when the reference point is insufficient or different, shadows disrupt our visual confidence. They compel us to question what we see and the structures that uphold that visibility.
Another central element to this exhibition is the hand, which immediately brings to mind issues such as authorship, teaching methods, legitimisation, and the art system as a whole. In A Arte de Desenhar (1980), both in its paper and video versions, Silveira provides an ironic review of academic drawing manuals. The hand appears as a technical instrument, but also as an organ of protest, aggression, censorship, and coded obscenity. In the midst of the Brazilian dictatorship, depicting certain gestures equated to making a coded political statement. The pedagogy of drawing thus became a field of friction.
The hands being plugged in and out in Plugged (2011), or which leave traces in Touch (2021), extend this reflection in a radically different technological context. The hand is an index of action, as well as a device of surveillance and control. In a world mediated by touchscreens, algorithms, and biometric identification systems, manual gestures are no longer innocent: they are data, records, traces. In the gallery space, these hands take on a performative dimension. They are not merely images hanging on the wall: they seem to activate or threaten the architectural surface.
As part of her experiments with spatialised, situated, and wandering graphics, Silveira has also incorporated insects —flies, beetles, flying creatures— as recurring figures since the 1990s. In Insectarium (2019), a proliferation of tiny bodies composes an unsettling tapestry. Flies, traditionally associated with dirt, decay, and marginality, invade the space as if they were the remains or traces of an invisible catastrophe —or a catastrophe we do not want to see. Here, the artist subverts the hierarchy of scale: the minimal becomes dominant. The heroic monument is replaced by infestation; the glorified figure by the swarm. This strategy echoes her early reflections on the counter-monument and her critique of official narratives. Flies do not celebrate or commemorate: they erode.
In dialogue with works on tourism and the shadows of power, insects additionally introduce an ecological and posthuman dimension. The world does not belong solely to the male figures in suits who cast their shadows on the ground. It also belongs to those who crawl, those who buzz, those who defy the logic of control. In this sense, Silveira’s work not only questions social and political structures, but also expands the field of the visible to include that which is usually left out of the frame.
The exhibition at la_oficina is not conceived as a retrospective or a chronological synthesis. Rather, it is a constellation of motifs and operations that span decades and, by reappearing in the present, demonstrate their persistence and capacity for transformation and updating. Here, core elements are brought together to reveal a coherent and constantly reinventing practice, capable of engaging with new technologies and contexts without sacrificing the critical sharpness that has defined it since its beginnings.
At a historic moment marked by intensifying inequalities, populism and extremism, digital surveillance and disinformation, the commodification of the urban experience, and the ecological crisis, Regina Silveira’s images continue to function as interferences. They compel us to pause, to be wary, to reconfigure our position in space and in society. They remind us that every image is a field of dispute and that, even in the seemingly neutral white space of the gallery, shadows are always cast, revealing what the system would rather remain invisible.