{"id":3974,"date":"2024-08-09T16:37:49","date_gmt":"2024-08-09T16:37:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/acervocarlitocarvalhosa.com.br\/?post_type=texto&p=3974"},"modified":"2024-09-30T23:11:13","modified_gmt":"2024-09-30T23:11:13","slug":"da-pintura-que-nao-da-pe-a-escultura-que-afoga","status":"publish","type":"texto","link":"https:\/\/acervocarlitocarvalhosa.com.br\/en\/texto\/da-pintura-que-nao-da-pe-a-escultura-que-afoga\/","title":{"rendered":"Da “pintura que n\u00e3o d\u00e1 p\u00e9” \u00e0 escultura que afoga"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Text written about the exhibition Please Do Not Touch<\/em>, curated by Lorenzo Mammi and presented in the main hall of the Centro Maria Antonia in 2005.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The empty main hall at the Centro Universit\u00e1rio Maria Antonia (Ceuma) on opening night must have been quite a sight to behold, with the public all corralled behind the little white rail aligned with the first two columns. Perhaps it is something like the works by Serra that gradually close in on people, except that, here, the wall was invisible and tenuous. From the part of the hall open to the public, all you could see was a plaster block wedged in a void.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere\u2019s none of that getting up close, slapping your beer can down on it and calling it mate!\u201d(1)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The title of this work by Carlito Carvalhosa was supposed to be Perna de tr\u00eas (Three-Leg Truss), but this was changed to Favor n\u00e3o tocar (Please Don\u2019t Touch) during construction, when the artist decided to erect a barrier to keep back the public. Knowing this name-that-almost-was-but-wasn\u2019t allows for some initial proximity between the sculpture on show at Ceuma and a series of works the artist produced at MuBE in 1999, entitled Duas \u00e1guas (Two Waters).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There would seem to be two families of titles in Carvalhosa\u2019s work: those that practically describe the physical constitution of the piece, such as Ceras perdidas (Lost Waxes) and Espelhos graxos (Greased Mirrors), and those that sit midway between technical terminology and poetic expression, between physical and metaphorical description of the work, such as Duas \u00e1guas (Two Waters) and Perna de tr\u00eas (Three-Leg Truss), with the added coincidence of both titles including numbers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perna de tr\u00eas is a device used in construction, while duas \u00e1guas refers to an inverted V-shaped roof that allows water to drain off on either side. The two facets of this roof-type inspired Jo\u00e3o Cabral de Melo Neto to take this as the title of a 1956 collection of published and unpublished works: one facet hermetic in nature, and the other more \u2018popular\u2019; poems to read and poems to be recited.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Besides a possible relationship between the names of the works, other common denominators between Duas \u00e1guas and the piece on show at Ceuma are the material used, the color and density disguised as levity. Might the Maria Antonia exhibition be a follow-up of the pieces exhibited at the MuBE in 1999, as if, beyond groupings by title, Carvalhosa\u2019s works also reveal a kinship of content?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This group of works is of more distant lineage to the perforated plaster sculptures shown at Galeria Raquel Arnaud in 2003, which establish greater dialogue with the glazed porcelain series of 1996\/7, not so much because of the perforations, but because of a sort of \u201cdry\u201d finishing, unlike the \u201chumid\u201d finishing of Duas \u00e1guas and Favor n\u00e3o tocar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe piece at the Raquel had various natures, a perforated part, a wafer-thin part, a more hybrid part, after the porcelain work. A piece you could walk around and around and it would always throw up something you hadn\u2019t noticed before. This time I figured it would be possible to see the thing with more intensity if I kept some distance from it; made the surrounding space part of the piece itself.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is as if the distance renders the sculpture more visible, in the sense of that original experience of seeing, as opposed to the contemporary experience of \u201cre-seeing\u201d, of which Paul Virilio speaks: \u201cToday, we are no longer truly \u2018see-ers\u2019 (voyants), but already \u2018resee-ers\u2019 (revoyants); the tautological repetition of the same, at work in our mode of (industrial) production, is at work equally in our mode of perception\u201d (Paul Vir\u00edrlio, L\u2019horizon n\u00e9gatif, Paris, 1984, p. 31).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The opposite of \u201creseeing\u201d is to \u201crender the invisible visible\u201d; the philosopher\u2019s self-ordained task. In order to combat this visual surplus that gets in the way of perception\u2014\u201cI was suddenly persuaded that vision gave less to see, that it was above all a process of occultation\u201d\u2014Virilio proposes a voluntary blindness that leads us to note the articulations between objects, not just the objects themselves, finding new and more complex forms in the intervals and interstices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By making the surrounding space part of the work, Carvalhosa forces us to adopt a sort of involuntary blindness. In our habitual eagerness to see more and better, to see and touch at close quarters, we end up\u2014between frustration and impotence, trapped there behind the railing\u2014failing to see the void and to consider how the thing came to be where it is, if there might be something somewhere out of view that is holding that shapeless body up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is interesting that the block was lowered rather than raised into position; it was built at a tilt, above the point where it would eventually wedge. The work slid into position, and then and only then did the artist insert the steel pegs to prevent it from sliding further over the course of the exhibition, which might not actually have happened, as the ton-weight of plaster is well and truly jammed between those columns.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This suspension harks back to the \u201cfrozen moment\u201d paintings exhibited at the Raquel Arnaud (in plaster, oil, grease and resin on mirror-glass). And also to earlier works in which the artist sandwiched wet plaster between glass. This suspension hovers somewhere between precariousness and lastingness, a paradox like that underscored by Rodrigo Naves in his text on the divided nature of the work.(2)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI like this paradox, I like the pieces to be unstable, in terms of their meaning, of the presence of the materials and their relationship with the space.\u201d

Lorenzo Mammi has some beautiful definitions for the artist\u2019s works as \u201cin-over-your-head painting,\u201d(3) and these can serve to clarify the current piece. This sculpture also draws us out of our depth, not out of some lack of definition between figure and background (which was what Mamm\u00ec saw in the paintings from 1989), but because it sits above the line of the horizon: we don\u2019t see the topside and find ourselves on the tips of our toes, craning our necks to keep chin above water.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another of Mammi\u2019s observations: \u201cthe truth of the work resides in some no-man\u2019s land between nothing and the anecdote.\u201d4 Favor n\u00e3o tocar also inhabits this realm between \u201cnothing and the anecdote\u201d because it evokes things without imitating anything (it resembles a cloud, a plane, a ship run aground, an animal, a shark, and yet it is none of these) and also because it hides its process of construction\u2014in line, once again, with the critic\u2019s reasoning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn fact, in-over-your-head sculpture would be a good name. However, I think there is a lack of definition in this piece between figure and background, and I think it transforms the scale of the room.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And, after all, is plaster a good or a bad thing?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPlaster is an everyday material, used in everything from the cast for a broken arm to the decorative finish of a ceiling. It is a material of transition in art, nobody gives it much thought, which is why it interests me. I like the way it goes from wet to dry, the way it is so neutral it\u2019s hard to know what it is. I once went to a baroque castle in Germany, where all the pillars were of plaster made to imitate marble. It seems that in the 17th century it was more expensive and sophisticated to make mock marble in plaster than to use real marble, and that\u2019s why the pillars were all made of plaster, with the fake proving more ostentatious than the real.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Notes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. The interventions, in quotation marks, are excerpts from an e-mail interview with Carlito Carvalhosa on July 27 and 28, 2005, concerning the exhibition at Ceuma.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. NAVES, Rodrigo. \u201c\u00d3leo sobre \u00e1gua\u201d, in Carlito Carvalhosa, Lorenzo Mamm\u00ec (org.). S\u00e3o Paulo: CosacNaify, 2000.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. MAMMI, Lorenzo. Preface to the book Carlito Carvalhosa. S\u00e3o Paulo: CosacNaify, 2000.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4. Ibidem.\u00a0

<\/p>\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n<\/p>

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