Text written for the Respira\u00e7\u00e3o Project, featuring Carlito Carvalhosa\u2019s exhibition \u2013 Regra de Dois (Rule of Two), at the Funda\u00e7\u00e3o Eva Klabin, in Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Eva Klabin Foundation is a space in suspension. Out of time: a time of waiting. A time between the life of the person who inhabited it and the time of the visitor who follows the steps of its owner through the house \u2014 with its full drawers, neatly arranged cupboards, and working kitchen \u2014 which now lies empty. The servants talking, the whispered gossip, the unrevealed secrets of Eva\u2019s dreams. This has all gone. The house has closed in on itself, isolated from the surrounding noise and the traffic, withdrawn into its own world, as though it no longer belonged to the reality around it. Everything is as it was when people lived in the house, but the emptiness that has been installed, of the age that disappeared with its owner, is now an unreal reality that envelops and imprisons it in a fantasy of absence. It is absence that now inhabits the house, stiffened into order by the act of collecting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When first confronted with the collection and the house, Carlito Carvalhosa said that he felt that there should be \u2014 although he could not detect it \u2014 a tension between the distinct nature of the objects and the order imposed by the collector, because everything appeared the same. I wonder whether his first impulse was not to perceive the presence of absence. The objects are still there, but the life that surrounded them is not. The order is striking \u2014 like a spatial incarnation of the void \u2014 establishing a peaceful harmony, which, like a great eraser, expunges any differences that might stand out. There is a foundational disproportion in the imagination of the visitor between how the eyes perceive the objects and the house and the image-memory that he or she takes away. It is the absence of life that imprints the reality with a cinematic sensation. The house is a film because it occupies the void left by those who inhabited it. It is a waiting for a time that never comes, because it has placed itself outside of time. Carvalhosa was keenly alert to this,d also become supports for some of the main pieces of furniture in the Renaissance Room, whose floor is strewn with a carpet of fluorescent lights, creating a sensation of suspension, almost levitation. With light and glasses, the artist intensifies the sensation of real unreality elicited by the absence of life that imbues this house, transforming it into a kind of depository for forms. The act of the artist, like that of a conjuror, introduces light \u2014 the element that is most lacking in the house \u2014 bringing back the fluidity of the intangible materials, which is the power capable of questioning the permanence of form.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Carlito Carvalhosa brings light to other settings in an intense manner: to the English Room and the passage between the Dining Room and the Chinese Room, as if he wanted to blind people with the excess of light, breaking down the depth of the space and allowing us to experience the flow of time within our own bodies more intimately. This artist has no romantic illusions about form. He is interested in discovering the connections that the surface of matter can establish in the depths of the world, as an always possible point in the depth of the universe, conceived as layers of surfaces. This leads him to another way of making form seem provocatively strange: by introducing nature into a world that is hostile to it, dominated and overrun by the world of culture, as he did at the Pal\u00e1cio da Aclama\u00e7\u00e3o, in Salvador.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the last section of the tour around Evan Klabin\u2019s house museum, we are confronted by a forest. Again the view is blocked. This work explicitly tells us that, as in a forest, the depth of space is gained by passing through layers of visible surfaces, which the mass of foliage does not allow us to do. In the face of the power of nature, the intensity of form is unable to bring peace, as in the collection, in which the difference is tamed and dissolved by the feeling of aggregation the collector has imposed upon it. Carlito Carvalhosa offers us his rule: the \u201crule of two\u201d, creating a passage between the potency of art and the nature in what they have in common, by treating forms as interstices, as something that is happening in between, showing us the cracks in the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rio de Janeiro, April 2011<\/p>\n\n\n
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