Artist Monograph
Publisher: SESI-SP Editora
Special essay: Agnaldo Farias
Format: Hardcover
Language: English, Brazilian-Portuguese

"This book is the result of the exhibition "Circonjecturas" - Works and installations by Paraná artist Rafael Silveira that took place from April to May 2018 at the FIESP Cultural Center. They are images that mix botany, tattooing, circus and advertising from the 1950s and were curated by Baixo Ribeiro. "Until arriving here the reader has passed through flowers, strawberries, flies, birds, spiders, skulls, hats, teeth, dentures, eyes, many eyes, heart. The opening of this book already shows Rafael Silveira's omnivorous voracity for images, images/things, images applied to animals and objects. His motifs and shapes vary a lot, they can be delicate and illustrative, like the butterflies printed on matchboxes, flamingos walking in the mist, a small leaflet with a row of teeth, the hyper-realistic amputated finger. The most interesting, what puts him in a unique position within our contemporary scene, is when he creates in the sense proposed by the great Huidobro, when he goes beyond what is "standing before us, surrounding our eyes," operating metamorphoses, fusions, and unforeseen juxtapositions between images. One can argue about the impropriety of the great poet's use of the term "create", which is in fact too heavy, since he places artists as demiurges. In this sense, Barthes' formulation about Giuseppe Arcimboldo, incidentally related to Raphael, is worthwhile: "his (Arcimboldo's) imagination is properly poetic: he does not create signs, he combines and interchanges them, he extravagates them - which is exactly what the worker of language does". Agnaldo Farias