The work \u201cSala de Espera\u201d [Waiting room] by Carlito Carvalhosa inaugurates the annex to the Museum of Contemporary Art of S\u00e3o Paulo (MAC-USP), in Ibirapuera Park in March 2013. The installation carries on a dialogue with various works of an institutional character, developed over several years by the artist, with developments shown in locations such as Salvador, Havana, New York, S\u00e3o Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, in which it offered the observer sensorial immersions of great delicacy and impact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In \u201cSala de Espera\u201d, the artist engages in subtle fashion with the broad, empty and pristine space designed in 1950 by Oscar Niemeyer, through a single, powerful material: wood. Around the clear successions of white columns, which support and lend a geometric precision to the space, he distributed some 80 posts, 9 to 12 m in length, which once served to hold up street lighting. This is not a rule-bound methodical composition. Its appearance instead refers to the organic, undisciplined character of forests, or to the tenuous equilibrium of matchsticks thrown casually in the children\u2019s game of jackstraws. The whole creates a strange, provocative landscape, constructed in the horizontal plane. In the artist\u2019s words, it is almost like a \u201csupine forest\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But similarities with the game stop there. The challenge proposed is not one of balance or of withdrawing a jackstraw without moving the others but of provoking observers, making them discover how a tangle of concrete and visual obstacles may cause a significant shift in our perception of the world. As the critic Fernando Cocchiarale summarizes, with these works, Carlito Carvalhosa does not intend \u201cto encourage a slow observation of the possible aesthetic properties of the work, but to allow it to be grasped sensibly, with silent inflections\u201d.1<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Since the start of his career, Carvalhosa has shown an interest in banal and neutral materials which often pass unnoticed and which appear to have emerged without any great effort or skill. This, for example, is the case of plaster, with which he constructed various sculptures and installations, such as the representation of Sugarloaf Mountain, with its top cut off and inverted, shown at the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro (MAM-RJ) (J\u00e1 estava assim quando cheguei [It was already like that when I arrived], 2006), which also carries a reference to the fact that the artist, originally from S\u00e3o Paulo, has been based in Rio for a decade or so. Or translucent fabrics explored in interventions, as was the case at MoMA (Sum of Days, 2011) and the 11th Havana Bienal (Vulgo, 2012). The whiteness, the veiled character and ambiguous nature of these materials form a vital part of the strategy of veiling\/unveiling of what is hidden and imperceptible, since it has become naturalized in the institutional spaces activated by the works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the same way, the old posts punctuate and provide a reference for the scene. These had already emerged in his work in a reduced form in an intervention realized in 2010, at the Pal\u00e1cio da Aclama\u00e7\u00e3o in Salvador, Bahia, suspended beside a large live aroeira tree in the central span of the neoclassical palace. Apparently, there is little in common between this intervention and the one in the annex designed by Niemeyer as a complement to the building now occupied by the MAC and which for decades was the headquarters of the S\u00e3o Paulo Traffic Department (Detran). Both nevertheless arrived at relatively similar results, albeit via opposing paths: they gain the attention of the observer, they underline less visible aspects of these locations and create an intriguing confusion of time and space. \u201cIt is curious that both the Italian palace in Salvador and this modernist hall point to something which isn\u2019t there\u201d, the artist points out. \u201cIn 1900, they sought a past, in 1950, a future\u201d, he notes ironically, highlighting the natural vocations of these places, which are subverted by his interventions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the case of the annex to the MAC, which shall henceforth become an important experimental space for contemporary art, the situation is even more peculiar. At the same time that it has a completely typical configuration of modernist architecture from the mid-20th century, \u201cthe first time that I saw the space it seemed to me an ideal world, with its multiplying columns\u201d, the artist recounts, it still has no reference as a museum space. As the title of the exhibition states, it is \u201cpending\u201d. Its vastness, the ideal character of its columns, the immaculate purity of the whiteness point to something which has not yet occurred. For this reason, instead of watching over what had become imperceptible due to the effect of time, it has brought the history deposited in the posts into this still sterile space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the face of a place which resembles a blank sheet of paper, Carvalhosa acts as draughtsman, with great simplicity, establishing a dialogue which is both impertinent and seductive at the same time. Impertinent because it cuts, denatures the rule of the vertical columns, disorganises and restructures them in a chaotic interplay of trunks which still bear the mark of time, and carry a long trajectory, embedded in their color and texture, from tree to post, from post to waste wood\u2026 also because they deliberately disrespect the margins of the \u201cpaper\u201d, refusing to be contained by its limits, pouring out of the frame of the internal walls, insofar as is permitted, since the Ibirapuera complex is a listed architectural property. It is seductive because the gaze, and the body, feel themselves attracted to exploring the multiple configurations of this drawing constructed in space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
S\u00e3o Paulo, March 2013<\/p>\n\n\n
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