On stopping and then vanishing

There are many skies in art today. There always were, in the history of art. Today perhaps more so – because they are central characters, not mere supporting players in some other scene. It would not be hard for a study of the imaginary to seek the reasons behind this tendency. But why, now, an embroidered sky, a sky therefore doubly evident? Perhaps because in São Paulo the sky is never visible, even though it is there. Arriving in São Paulo by plane, the sky is a brownish-yellow band weighing on the city and cancelling the real sky. At Congonhas airport, long ago, in the vault of the inner hall that sends people off to their destinations, there was a dome and in it a painted, “realistic” sky. Congonhas is the ceiling of São Paulo, Congonhas is already the sky of São Paulo – yet even at Congonhas there had to be another sky, opening a false hole onto the real sky that the planes pierce at every moment. Perhaps several skies are needed in São Paulo, several skies over São Paulo. There is a history of the sky over São Paulo, which now includes this one too.

Regina Silveira has made several skies. Indoors, as at the Museu Vale, in Vitória; and outdoors, as for a library in New York (not yet realised). Indoors, as at the Pinacoteca, not long ago. Outdoors, as this one now at MASP, enormous, enveloping. Regina worked for a long time in black and white, with dark, at times threatening shadows. Now she summons skies, blue and white.

Her register here is that of public art, urban art as it is also called, somewhat crookedly perhaps (art is always urban or it is not art). Since São Paulo is still very ugly, with a hurried, scribbled, boxed-up, cramped, overlaid architecture in a compressed setting, public art ought to be a permanent resource. It is not yet. Regina Silveira has long devoted herself to the genre, perhaps more abroad, where the receptiveness and the awareness of that need are stronger. Even so, someone will remember a stampede she applied to the façade of the Biennial pavilion a few years ago, and other installations or “strolls” (with projections), more or less provisional, through the streets of the city. Abroad, two cases stand out: the façade of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, in Taiwan, and the Palacio de Cristal in Madrid, landmarks in her personal history.

Hers is a singular art. It is not hard to grasp – unlike many others that still insist on the rarefaction of meaning – while remaining sophisticated in its means and effects. To make an embroidered sky could point to the option of a “gendered art”, as one euphemistically says today instead of pointing to what lies behind that word: an art of sex, with sex. The sky is embroidered, and so, by the ready-made code, it would be a feminine sky, anti-feminist or post-feminist, depending on the reading. It is an embroidered sky, a sky that needs to be glued onto a façade that has never served art as well as it does now. The sky in São Paulo escapes the eyes, and therefore the body, with astonishing speed: the glued-on sky will remain parked for a while at MASP. With it, time will also stand still, as will those who wish to enjoy it. Contemporary art against the flow of things, and yet contemporary art that will soon vanish from that façade, it too – an art that accepts vanishing. The eternal precariousness of skies meets the transience of today's art, in passing harmony.

— Teixeira Coelho, curator

Text: reginasilveira.com