Published in Concinnitas magazine, december 2011<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cTransforming the absence of light of the Casa Eva Klabin into the principal issue\u201d1<\/sup> of Regra de dois [Rule of two], an installation realized in April 2011 in Rio de Janeiro, was the objective of the artist from S\u00e3o Paulo, Carlito Carvalhosa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Living at night and sleeping during the day is one of the characteristics which feeds the particular biography of the collector, Eva Klabin, and in the house in which she lived on the Lagoa [Lagoon] in Rio de Janeiro, the windows are still shut like iron curtains, closed to reality. This is a \u201csuspended space\u201d, \u201coutside time\u201d and outside Doctors\u2019 curation largely rests on this narrative and constitutes the operational fact for artists selected to stage interventions here since 2004: an exercise in confrontation between the works and the world of Eva Klabin, which is surprisingly persistent in the curatorial circuit in Rio, with participants including Jos\u00e9 Damasceno (2004), Chelpa Ferro (2005), Paulo Vivacqua (2006), Anna Bella Geiger (2006), Rui Chafes (2007) and Cl\u00e1udia Bakker (2007).<\/p>\n\n\n\n I shall briefly deal with the role of space in the work of Carvalhosa and in the practice of curatorship, before moving on to the subjectivity which the artist produced in Regra de dois. Finally I shall consider the extent to which the curatorial narrative takes part in the activation of this subjectivity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Already in the first paintings which he exhibited at the end of the 1980s 2<\/sup>, but principally starting from the intervention with blocks of asphalt in an abandoned area of the West Zone of S\u00e3o Paulo,3<\/sup> we perceived that Carlito Carvalhosa is interested in the relationship between space and the act of construction. Mobilized by the artist, construction is a process of reordering the world in front of us, it is the sustaining of chaos and hence an activity of differentiation in the face of nature. Initially through asphalt blocks and later through plaster (e.g. Gibraltar, 2000, CAPC Bordeaux, France), through porcelain sculptures (e.g. Carlito Carvalhosa, Gabinete de Arte Raquel Arnaud, 1997), through mirrors (e.g. Melhor assim [Better like that], Soso +, S\u00e3o Paulo, 2010) or through sound (e.g. Sum of days, Pinacoteca do Estado de S\u00e3o Paulo), etc., a conception of sculpture4<\/sup> as construction, as a gesture of adding to and subtracting from the void runs through his work. American post-minimalism is hence fertile ground for observing the work of Carlito Carvalhosa, specifically in the \u201cerotic or emotive alternative\u201d to minimalism, as noted by the critic of the movement, Lucy Lippard. It is thus possible to discern the line leading to the postmodern exercise which, from the 1970s onwards, shuffles minimalist and post-minimalist lessons and expands the object of sculpture to the reality around it, appropriating an ever greater diversity of scales, meanings and materials. Consequently, it includes the memory and subjectivity of the spectator in the experiencing of the works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Although we can have an experience with certain works of Carvalhosa similar to what Richard Serra mentioned when he referred to Judd\u2019s objects \u2212 \u201cJudd\u2019s work is to be looked at, first and foremost\u201d, there is a diversion by someone who thinks of a place in two ways, as a phenomenological and a retinal fact. Perhaps there is an equation in play between physical aspects, such as size, scale, light, temperature, architecture, etc. and individual or collective aspects of the experience and memory of the observer. In this sense, the block of asphalt in an abandoned area of S\u00e3o Paulo or the set of trees suspended in the main span of the Pal\u00e1cio da Aclama\u00e7\u00e3o, in Salvador, Bahia,5<\/sup> are demonstrations of this permanent dynamic between the gaze and the imagination, relating to expectation and elaboration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For this very reason, the use of space in Carvalhosa\u2019s installations is ambiguous, vacillating permanently between contemplation and experience, between distance and approximation, between optic and haptic. The defining coordinates of a place are constantly permuted into a continuous fair play, as if the idealism of modern sculpture and the expanded field of sculpture, the peaceful coexistence between the observer\/work paradigm and the observer\/work\/place paradigm could cohabit simultaneously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Regra de dois, the installation at the Casa-Museu Klabin, takes up various issues which the work of Carlito Carvalhosa has been presenting for some time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In short, this is an installation of ordinary materials, cups, glass, neon, trees, which establishes a route through the two floors of the house, moving through the common and private spaces. The walk relates to the intervals of these places and makes the experience happen simultaneously. It is a measure of time which is already found in other works, such as Apagador [Candle snuffer] (Chapel of Nossa Senhora da Concei\u00e7\u00e3o, Solar do Unh\u00e3o, 2007), Faz parte [It\u2019s part of it] (Galeria Millan, 2008), or A soma dos dias [Sum of days] (Pinacoteca do Estado de S\u00e3o Paulo, 2010), in which the observer is led to coordinate the evolution of the body in its time, with this appearing to constitute a pretext for Carlito\u2019s interventions to be something more than simple objects arranged in space, more than \u201cmere\u201d heirs of sculpture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The interplay between the light (as well as its fictional uses) and the collection of Eva Klabin\u2019s artistic and decorative objects will constitute the new place which Carvalhosa conceives, establishing a certain method for questioning the effects which he intends to create. We can suggest that his installation unfolds into four specific ideas: levitation, surface, prohibition and dreams, which observers will experience during their journey through the house.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first space that we enter is the Sala Renascen\u00e7a [Renaissance Room], where Regra de dois becomes more expressive. Carvalhosa has arranged the entire furniture of this room on glass cups of various dimensions and forms. The room \u2018levitates\u2019 a few centimeters above the ground and the floor is an immense white neon light6<\/sup> on which we step. A pure blow, a pure visual wound which blinds us. Here, as in the rest of the house, we are surrounded by objects from the collection, from various periods and of different origins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Although the question of collecting is one of the premises of this curatorship and may indeed have challenged the artist, what \u201cappears\u201d to us in the installation (equally important in Carvalhosa\u2019s work) is what Coleridge calls a willing suspension of disbelief. Objects which we know to belong to reality have suddenly dissolved their habitual properties and are transmuted. A ditch of imponderables is dug between us and them, which threatens familiar logics. In order to produce this effect, Carvalhosa has arranged his objects in an order absolutely symmetrical to the one in which the collector Eva Klabin has arranged hers, causing unforeseen confrontations between the light of the trivial glasses and, for example, a painting by Tintoretto. \u201cA symmetrical order unifies glass cups and the objects existing in the room. Distinct cups in symmetrical positions become equal through their function and not their appearance. Order is an element of suspension from one thing to another: the place waiting for and dissolving the objects.\u201d7<\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n Poor materials which become rich and profane, which become sacred, in a paradoxical process, the forms of which systematically reject pre-established cultural meanings. As the critic Rodrigo Naves observes, there is an \u201cabsolute lack of empathy\u201d which allows the coexistence in his works of \u201cplastic qualities which should not coexist with each other and because they are grouped together in this way, endanger our perception, since it is practically impossible to accommodate them in the same object\u201d.8<\/sup> Like the artist\u2019s great amorphous (blind) masses of plaster with which we are familiar, the coexistence of the glass of the cups with the furniture of the room generates a \u201clack of empathy\u201d between force and lightness and, I would add, simultaneously manipulates and neutralizes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The second moment happens in the space opposite the Sala Inglesa [English Room], with the artist covering its principal wall with the neon light mentioned above, with an increasing gain for our perception. Light functions as a \u2018surface\u2019, but also as black matter which swallows everything around it, dissolving the layers of history and the knot of temporalities which dwells there. The wall becomes averse to any logic of exhibition and subverts the idea of a directed gaze, the museological \u2018offering of something to be seen\u2019 which is inherent to any presentation of objects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Also on the ground floor, between the dining room and the Sala Chinesa [Chinese Room], Carvalhosa has erected a \u2018barrier\u2019 of light which prevents the passage between the two spaces. A physical barrier which we cannot cross but which allows us to see beyond it, like in certain suspended neon installations by Dan Flavin, which appear to us to be places without space, due to the excessive light.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the upper floor and ending the route, Carvalhosa resolves the installation in a direction which goes from the materiality of the objects to the production of an \u2018open\u2019 image that is almost cinematographic. The light is low, somber, almost dark. Before us, four trees are suspended in Eva Klabin\u2019s bathroom. Eloquent, but nothing more. The effect is disconcerting, but its meaning is easily delineated, not because there is nothing to say, but perhaps because in this case, language is not a priority. The work causes a kind of recoiling in us (epoch\u00e9) which opens the way to a non-verbal state, in an experience very similar to the one that Carvalhosa wished to offer on the Maragoji Road (Macei\u00f3-Recife), when he recorded something impossible such as a car under a tree. \u201cImagining that this is art, in this case, pacifies our understanding. What can that be?\u201d,9<\/sup> he asks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To what degree does Regra de dois respond to the curatorship? Perhaps, in the case of Carvalhosa\u2019s installation, Klabin\u2019s narrative has served as a pretext, but not as a premise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is a dialogue which we can glimpse with Doctors\u2019 curatorial narrative and which is linked to Eva Klabin\u2019s singular history, but I think that the subjectivity of Carlito Carvalhosa\u2019s proposal is intensified by the continuity of his works. A priori, his entire oeuvre contains the idea that space (any space) is open to an interplay of superdeterminations in which the artist and the observer manipulate memory, perceptions and temporalities; or the idea that aesthetic experience does not speak, is aphasic, but nevertheless gives the floor to language. Questions such as temporality, space or the status of objects are already present in Carvalhosa\u2019s work in a form which is more radical than the narrative of the curatorship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But if the point of departure is M\u00e1rcio Doctors\u2019 work, and this is already his 13th choice, we see that the mark of authorship which he gave to the Projeto Respira\u00e7\u00e3o [Breathing Project] is reinforced with a consistent line of research based on Benjamin\u2019s notion of historical past, present and future \u2018becoming\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Returning to curatorship, this essential noise which allows us to experience other narratives that give meaning to the creative impulse, it often takes on a belief in the specificity of space and in the adjustment between the place and the work (or between the place and the artist). Curators will inevitably take risks when they choose artists instead of projects, since results may evade expectations. Carlito Carvalhosa affirms that \u201cthe idea of making a thing especially for a place does not exist. Things always get out of place\u201d. The place for the artist and the place for the curator are not one and the same.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rio de Janeiro,2011<\/p>\n\n\n\n 1 <\/sup>O Globo, 25.4.2011. Second Section<\/p>\n\n\n\n 2 <\/sup>Subdistrito Comercial de Arte, S\u00e3o Paulo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 3 <\/sup>Carvalhosa\u2019s intervention took place in the abandoned Matarazzo factory in \u00c1gua Branca, in the West Zone of S\u00e3o Paulo. Artecidade \u2013 a cidade e as suas hist\u00f3rias [Cityart \u2013 the city and its histories], curated by Nelson Brissac Peixoto, 1997.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 4 <\/sup>Although references to architecture and to contemporary architects arise in critical texts, e.g. Espelhos graxos [Greasy mirrors], by Paulo Venancio Filho, on the exhibition Carlito Carvalhosa, at the Gabinete de Arte Raquel Arnaud, S\u00e3o Paulo, 2002.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 5 <\/sup>Roteiro para visita\u00e7\u00e3o, Programa Ocupas, Curator: Daniel Rangel, Pal\u00e1cio da Aclama\u00e7\u00e3o, Salvador, Bahia, 2010.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 6 <\/sup>This particular understanding of the light was attempted at the Soso + Gallery, in Melhor assim, S\u00e3o Paulo, 2010.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 7 <\/sup>E-mails exchanged with Carlito Carvalhosa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 8 <\/sup>Naves, Rodrigo, \u00d3leo sobre \u00e1gua [Oil on water], in Carlito Carvalhosa, S\u00e3o Paulo: Pubs. Cosac&Naify, 2000.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 9<\/sup> E-mails exchanged with Carlito Carvalhosa.<\/p>\n\n\n \n<\/p><\/body>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"decada":[6],"class_list":["post-4077","texto","type-texto","status-publish","hentry","decada-6"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/acervocarlitocarvalhosa.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/texto\/4077","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/acervocarlitocarvalhosa.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/texto"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/acervocarlitocarvalhosa.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/texto"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acervocarlitocarvalhosa.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/acervocarlitocarvalhosa.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/texto\/4077\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4080,"href":"https:\/\/acervocarlitocarvalhosa.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/texto\/4077\/revisions\/4080"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/acervocarlitocarvalhosa.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4077"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"decada","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acervocarlitocarvalhosa.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/decada?post=4077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}