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Lot Essay
Based in Rio de Janeiro, Carvalhosa emerged in the 1980s as part of the collective Grupo Casa 7 and ranks today among Brazil’s most acclaimed artists, celebrated for his conceptually-minded sculpture and immersive, environmental installations. Trained as an architect at the University of São Paulo, he has consistently probed the relationship between constructed space and materials, engaging a range of media—wax, asphalt, porcelain, mirrors—to express the lived, and illusory, experience of surfaces, volumes, and environments. His monumental installation, Sum of Days, debuted at São Paulo’s Pinacoteca do Estado in 2010 and traveled to New York’s Museum of Modern Art the following year, marking his first museum exhibition in the United States. Constructed from sheer scrim cloths that billowed sixty feet from ceiling to floor, Sum of Days invited viewers to move within elliptical passages toward its center, sometimes empty and other times inhabited, serendipitously, by musical performers; ambient noise, captured each day by suspended microphones, was played back the following day, creating a temporal and interactive feedback loop. Carvalhosa adapted the work’s material and sonic structure in both earlier and subsequent exhibitions, incorporating lights and reflective surfaces in a continuing meditation on the nature of space and displacement, presence and absence.
The present works belong to a series of paintings exhibited at Silva Cintra + Box 4 (Rio de Janeiro, 2011) and at Sonnabend Gallery (New York, 2012), in each case as part of room-sized installations encompassing lines of fluorescent lighting, indented aluminum plates, translucent white cloth, and participatory sound. “His unorthodox and visionary fabrications suggest an acute knowledge of architecture and spatial interaction, while his handling of light and space is concurrently an act of camouflage and disclosure,” observed critic Elaine A. King of the Sonnabend installation, titled Shift. “On entering the gallery, one stepped into a labyrinth of flowing, gossamer-like fabric arranged in narrow rows of parallel tapered pathways,” she explained. “Traversing the space, the viewer became engulfed in a billowy, ashen maze, where spatial instability prompted disorientation.” In the second gallery, rows of lights arranged on the floor and wall separated two facing walls, one with non-reflective metal plates, embossed in irregular patterns, and the other with mirrored panels painted, like P 38 and P 40, in cobalt blue. “Walking around in this bright-white room altered one’s spatial and bodily perceptions, as light and geometric form seemed to magically dematerialize interior space,” King reflected. “Carvalhosa’s art is by no means limited to the visual—he aims to communicate a synaesthetic awareness. He wants viewers to question appearances and to ask how they feel in each altered setting. His installations feed the eye and the mind, providing a complex, yet refreshing alternative to our era of immediacy and fragmentation.”[1]
As in the other paintings in this series, the mirrored surfaces of P 38 and P 40 reveal amorphous shapes, alien and yet recognizable, against a deep-blue ground. The brushstrokes are visible and frenzied, their haptic energy—vertical and horizontal, zigzag and scrawled—in stark distinction to the works’ pristine aluminum finish. Their expressionistic handling recalls Carvalhosa’s earlier work in wax and clay, in which the malleability of the medium yielded translucent and porous surfaces, molded and materially transformed by fire. The choice of color additionally recalls the monochrome abstraction of Yves Klein, whose eponymous blue suggestively evoked freedom and cosmic infinity. (Klein’s performative and aural practices, as well as his interests in space and (im)materiality, mark further areas of correspondence.) Here, the subjectivity of the oil paint stands in counterpoint to the inherent self-reflexivity of the mirror, in which we inevitably encounter ourselves. “A mirror is not just any surface,” curator Paulo Venancio Filho insists, “but one that inevitably stokes our narcissistic impulses. There is no resisting the allure that draws the eye unappealably towards that surface, in which we see ourselves twofold: in the painting and in the mirror. . . . These paintings that put our reflections inside them are also mirrors. We are in there when we look at them and see ourselves seeing.”[2] This absorptive quality is amplified through repetition and light, an effect optimized in the New York and Rio de Janeiro installations in the disposition of fluorescent lights in narrow corridors, through which the viewer moved, and in the obduracy—the non-reflection—of the opposing metal panels.
“Carlito’s works are basically surfaces that dissolve into volume, or volumes that disappear into their surfaces,” remarked curator Lorenzo Mammì of Carvalhosa’s practice at large. “In other words, they express the impossibility of sensing a surface without its thickness, or conversely, of imagining a volume in an unambiguous way, through its surface.” This spatial ambiguity is a constant in works “in which the gaze loses itself without finding a definitive halting point. Such paintings have no floor, no background, and hence, no plane. At the same time, it is not possible to say that such works tend towards a three-dimensional character, but instead hover in an ambiguous dimension, and are neither object nor image, neither body nor figure. . . . It is not by chance that his materials tend to be docile, mimetic, without a definite character and hence sensitive to the least occurrence. White and the translucent prevail among his colours, causing a chromatic annihilation that generates an ever-changing spectrum of luminous variations. The forms always refer to something without imitating anything. The final result reveals the process of constructing the work, while at the same time falsifying it, altering the information on the consistency of its materials, their weight or the effort required for its manipulation. The truth of the work thus lies in an undefined territory between nothingness and the anecdotal, the unimportant singularity and the hollow generality.”[3]
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
The present works belong to a series of paintings exhibited at Silva Cintra + Box 4 (Rio de Janeiro, 2011) and at Sonnabend Gallery (New York, 2012), in each case as part of room-sized installations encompassing lines of fluorescent lighting, indented aluminum plates, translucent white cloth, and participatory sound. “His unorthodox and visionary fabrications suggest an acute knowledge of architecture and spatial interaction, while his handling of light and space is concurrently an act of camouflage and disclosure,” observed critic Elaine A. King of the Sonnabend installation, titled Shift. “On entering the gallery, one stepped into a labyrinth of flowing, gossamer-like fabric arranged in narrow rows of parallel tapered pathways,” she explained. “Traversing the space, the viewer became engulfed in a billowy, ashen maze, where spatial instability prompted disorientation.” In the second gallery, rows of lights arranged on the floor and wall separated two facing walls, one with non-reflective metal plates, embossed in irregular patterns, and the other with mirrored panels painted, like P 38 and P 40, in cobalt blue. “Walking around in this bright-white room altered one’s spatial and bodily perceptions, as light and geometric form seemed to magically dematerialize interior space,” King reflected. “Carvalhosa’s art is by no means limited to the visual—he aims to communicate a synaesthetic awareness. He wants viewers to question appearances and to ask how they feel in each altered setting. His installations feed the eye and the mind, providing a complex, yet refreshing alternative to our era of immediacy and fragmentation.”[1]
As in the other paintings in this series, the mirrored surfaces of P 38 and P 40 reveal amorphous shapes, alien and yet recognizable, against a deep-blue ground. The brushstrokes are visible and frenzied, their haptic energy—vertical and horizontal, zigzag and scrawled—in stark distinction to the works’ pristine aluminum finish. Their expressionistic handling recalls Carvalhosa’s earlier work in wax and clay, in which the malleability of the medium yielded translucent and porous surfaces, molded and materially transformed by fire. The choice of color additionally recalls the monochrome abstraction of Yves Klein, whose eponymous blue suggestively evoked freedom and cosmic infinity. (Klein’s performative and aural practices, as well as his interests in space and (im)materiality, mark further areas of correspondence.) Here, the subjectivity of the oil paint stands in counterpoint to the inherent self-reflexivity of the mirror, in which we inevitably encounter ourselves. “A mirror is not just any surface,” curator Paulo Venancio Filho insists, “but one that inevitably stokes our narcissistic impulses. There is no resisting the allure that draws the eye unappealably towards that surface, in which we see ourselves twofold: in the painting and in the mirror. . . . These paintings that put our reflections inside them are also mirrors. We are in there when we look at them and see ourselves seeing.”[2] This absorptive quality is amplified through repetition and light, an effect optimized in the New York and Rio de Janeiro installations in the disposition of fluorescent lights in narrow corridors, through which the viewer moved, and in the obduracy—the non-reflection—of the opposing metal panels.
“Carlito’s works are basically surfaces that dissolve into volume, or volumes that disappear into their surfaces,” remarked curator Lorenzo Mammì of Carvalhosa’s practice at large. “In other words, they express the impossibility of sensing a surface without its thickness, or conversely, of imagining a volume in an unambiguous way, through its surface.” This spatial ambiguity is a constant in works “in which the gaze loses itself without finding a definitive halting point. Such paintings have no floor, no background, and hence, no plane. At the same time, it is not possible to say that such works tend towards a three-dimensional character, but instead hover in an ambiguous dimension, and are neither object nor image, neither body nor figure. . . . It is not by chance that his materials tend to be docile, mimetic, without a definite character and hence sensitive to the least occurrence. White and the translucent prevail among his colours, causing a chromatic annihilation that generates an ever-changing spectrum of luminous variations. The forms always refer to something without imitating anything. The final result reveals the process of constructing the work, while at the same time falsifying it, altering the information on the consistency of its materials, their weight or the effort required for its manipulation. The truth of the work thus lies in an undefined territory between nothingness and the anecdotal, the unimportant singularity and the hollow generality.”[3]
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park