We had never seen a hall of mirrors quite like this one. Mirrors that you would think defective or imperfect if you came across them somewhere, for only a manufacturing flaw could explain why the reflection we expect to stare back at us is obstructed by some caked layer or smudge that blots out our faces, some form of seepage trapped and immobilized on the inside. We see ourselves in these mirrors, but cannot quite discern what it is that has butted in, or whether it is there to be seen or to prevent us from seeing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A mirror is not just any surface, 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. And that intruder, which belongs to the \u201cpainting\u201d, stands between us and our reflection, and we have to dodge it in order to see ourselves. So the defect is actually an effect? The \u201cmirror mirror on the wall\u201d is occupied by something other, and we don\u2019t know how it got there. How did it get inside? What work is this that a viscous, greasy material can produce, having infiltrated and settled therein, unwanted, making a nuisance of itself? It has raised from horizontality to verticality, like a puddle that is flung in our faces; a floor become wall, stamping the totalizing visual violence of our day into those pools of grease, which, at least, are the material itself, without manipulation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These paintings that put our reflections inside them are also mirrors. We are in there when we look at them and see ourselves seeing. Yet the surface is smeared with something we cannot identify. Some homeless image now squats there, where people come and go, glancing quickly before moving on, but never staying. The mirror has become a viscous window display, robbed of its original use, hijacked by a gooey substance that has this tacky glittery aspect of more than dubious taste, an effect the grease exploits to create this visual intrigue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As I see it, through what goes on in the mirrors, Carlito Carvalhosa gives continuity to the impulse toward form that is proper to painting, but which will, from now on, reside in the oscillating and the ambivalent, the upstanding and the suspect, the vulgar and the sophisticated, transferring autonomy of form to the behavior of a single ordinary material, grease. The mirror surface strives to repel the prevailing principle of total plasticity expressed in these greasy blotches and smudges, as theirs is an unpleasant blur, the antithesis of unequivocal specular clarity\u2014such that the resulting visual experience suggests a whole array of disparate references external to the form taken in isolation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What we can see is that the work has left behind the earlier closed organization in order to exhibit an amplified and risky external contamination. The anterior form, organic and dominated by organicity, circumscribed by the monochrome and cohesion of the single material, seems here to have circulated in unsuspected or frankly suspect environments to which the mirror is a witness. These images have wandered, experienced the excessive reflection of vernacular and nauseating displays of vulgar glitter, the dubious highlighting of cultural declassification that a lack of distinction brings into relief, depreciating everything. This empire of viscous, formless narcissism might seem superficial and specular, but it is not. The task of reconverting its own marked degradation by appellative commercial consumerism to an experience of form therefore becomes an interesting challenge. We remain at some point beyond the process Andy Warhol followed at close-quarters, now dissolved into a post-kitsch emulsion of higher glamorized pop; stages of ferocious degradation that art has accompanied. Extracting some expression of beauty from this grotesquely self-satisfied countenance requires decontamination, and that means taking the fascination this sheen irresistibly holds and consigning it to suspension in a void, reconverting the enchanting fatuity that emanates from it. This shift in Carlito\u2019s work has something of contemporary architecture to it, which likewise strives to lend plastic expression to technological saturation and articulate freely the effect of the image with the possibilities of the material, and vice-versa, as do Frank Gehry\u2019s titanium curves, for example.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is reasonable that the mirror should come after the plaster, to which it stands as an opposite; as if one absorbed and captured the other visually; as mutually negating pairs, with one striving to occupy the space of the other. And both, simultaneously, demonstrate this dysfunctional nature of the totalization of the image that the work of Carlito Carvalhosa attempts to accentuate and reveal in the current state of things: the abundance offered to the gaze and the little that taxes the eye.
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