Simultaneously with the exhibition of Julio Le Parc, the Galeria Nara Roesler presents the second solo exhibition of Carlito Carvalhosa in São. These are works produced in different moments of his artistic career, from the beginning of the 1990s onwards. The main room of the exhibition houses an unprecedented installation of large proportions, made up of white fabrics, ropes and tubular fluorescent lamps – noteworthy elements in their vocabulary. Unlike some of his fabric works – such as A Soma dos Dias {The Sum of Days} (2010) – here the material does not extend to the ground, but is tied up, forming figures that resemble inverted mountains. This format, in turn, is reminiscent of other of his works, such as Já estava assim quando cheguei {It was already like this when I arrived} (2006), a monumental sculpture in plaster that mirrors the curves of Pão de Açúcar. This metalinguistic will to revisit the work itself, coupled with notions of trompe l’oeil and a non-linear approach to time, guide the exhibition.
Also in the main room is a series of wall art pieces, which consists of aluminum plates with percussion, resin and white paint; the pieces are from the period between 2011 and 2017. The semi-reflective surface of the aluminum echoes defining works of the artist’s production, in which he uses mirrors as the basis for painting. Exemplary of these works, which he has been developing since the mid-2000s, are exhibited in the two front rooms of the gallery. The mirrors appeared in Carvalhosa’s vocabulary at a time when he felt like painting again – painting was the technique that first brought him recognition in the 1980s – but not on canvas. He says, “the mirror was a fugitive surface, which is nowhere; it allowed a type of painting that was ‘in’. And it was spacial, in a way, it was about this matter of the work taking care of the space. But it’s just the opposite, it’s really the space that takes care of the work.” The fascination with the mirror has lasted for years, and with it the artist has produced dozens of pieces with the most varied colors, inks, formats and techniques.
Other works, which form the front rooms, belong to a 2000’s series, in which Carvalhosa created small porcelain sculptures during a period in Holland. The material here is presented rough, unpainted, with slight variations of its natural beige between one piece and another. In their amorphousness, they resemble tamped homemade noodles. In addition to these, the rooms are also populated by a series of wax sculptures. While the surface of the works refers to the texture of fabrics with small drapes, from these plans emerge forms that resemble little fingers. Again here, some of the pieces were produced years ago, others recently; even if the color sometimes gritty, or the worn surface of older works reveals its age, when exposing similar works made with a time gap Carvalhosa invites the viewer to immerse himself in a non-linear perspective where, like the Aleph, inhabit the beginning, the end and the middle.
About the artist:
Carlito Carvalhosa (born 1961, São Paulo, Brazil) lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. Carvalhosa appeared in the national art scene in the 1980s, as a member of the collective Grupo Casa 7, alongside Rodrigo Andrade, Fabio Miguez, Nuno Ramos and Paulo Monteiro, a period in which he produced large paintings with an emphasis on the pictorial gesture. For more than twenty years the artist has been using varied means and various types of objects – including lamps, fabrics, wax, wood and mirrors – to investigate the architectural space, the nature of materials in abstract forms and the reception of the spectator in contact with them. According to the Portuguese curator Marta Mestre, what interests the artist is “the relation between space and the act of building. Mobilized by the artist, construction is a process to reorder the world ahead of it, to withstand its chaos and thus to differentiate activity from nature.” Mestre also points out that the work of Carvalhosa is “permeated by the thought of sculpture as a construction, adding the gesture and removing the emptiness”. These observations are evident in his more recent works such as Soma dos Dias {A Sum of Days}, a monumental site-specific installation made for the Octagon project at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (2010) and at the MoMA atrium (2011), and the installation Sala de Espera {Waiting Room} at MAC-USP (2013), in which twenty-four wooden posts were suspended in the exhibition space, in conjunction with the Niemeyer architecture.
Carvalhosa participated in the Biennial of Havana, Cuba (1986 and 2012); of the Mercosur Biennial in Porto Alegre, Brazil (2001 and 2009); of the 18th São Paulo Biennial, Brazil (1985). He performed the Rio action at MoMA in New York (2014) and some of his solo shows: at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil (2013); in the Containers Project, Guimarães, Portugal (2012); and at MoMA, New York, USA (2011).
His works are included in important public collections, such as: Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami, USA; FUNARTE, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Museum of Art of Pará, Belém, Brazil; Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Pinacoteca of the State of São Paulo, Brazil; Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, Brazil; Museum of Contemporary Art, University of São Paulo, Brazil; Museum of Contemporary Art of Niterói, Brazil; Museum of Modern Art of Bahia, Salvador, Brazil.
Carlito Carvalhosa: I do everything to do nothing at Galeria Nara Roesler
22 East 69th Street 3R
New York, NY 10021, USA
