Held in sight, held in hand: distorting perspective in Regina Silveira’s ‘Enigma’ postcard series

The ‘Enigma’ series (1981/83) by the Brazilian artist Regina Silveira (b.1939) pairs photographs of quotidian objects with distorted shadows, the sources of which are absent. First produced as gelatin silver prints in 1981 and subsequently printed as postcards, these works unsettle familiar relationships between objects, images and viewers. This article argues that the postcard format extends Silveira’s experiments with perspective in ways unavailable to either the original prints or her later site-specific installations. It examines the series through three interconnected lenses: correspondence art, anamorphic distortion and the representation of domestic objects. Made under Brazil’s military dictatorship and its aftermath, ‘Enigma’ exposes the instability of apparently ordered spaces and the coercive forces shaping everyday perception. The postcards’ portability, double-sided format and the possibility they offer for physical handling implicate viewers in their illusions, making porous the boundaries between public and private, representation and lived experience. A concluding analysis of an ‘Enigma’ postcard sent to fellow correspondence artist Ulises Carrión (1941–89) considers how personal correspondence sustains affective ties across geographical and institutional boundaries. In Silveira’s practice, the postcard is more than a transitional format: its material form is integral to the work’s questioning of visual authority and constructed reality.