Under Niemeyer\u2019s roof, which slides as a curve between the asymmetric walls of the annex to MAC Ibirapuera\u2019s new headquarters, the posts are suspended from the columns. The first impression is of contrast: between the gentle descent from the ceiling and the abruptly interrupted fall of the trunks; between the rough and fissured logs and the immaculate and smooth whiteness of the walls; between the straight line and the curve, the continuous and the fragmented. In the abstract space of architecture, where even irregularity forms part of the thinking, the posts introduce fragments of real life: the iron plates on top, which defended them from the infiltration of rain; rusted remnants of clips that held the wires; the marks of time in the trunks, the wear and tear on the bases. But there are also exchanges: the posts pierce the walls with rough holes and attach themselves to the almost immaterial columns with conspicuous pins and nuts. They also cling to each other, as if trying to hold each other blindly while they collapse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The majority of the posts have at least two points of support, on the ground, on columns or on the other posts; but the arrangement was determined on the basis of the spontaneous oscillation of the trunks. The wood does not have a homogeneous weight: these are dead trees, drying from the top down. The sap descends to the foot and petrifies there. Fissures open at the top, where the material is more rarefied. Fixed to a point, they incline on one side until they meet the ground or another post, which in turn determine their inclination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Everything falls, not only in relation to external space but also internally. Scientists state that some solid bodies (e.g. glass) are actually very high density liquids, which flow with continuous motion, but remarkably slowly. Some of them would take longer than the age of the universe for their movement to become perceptible . Perhaps all materials are like this, liquids which flow downwards very, very slowly. With sufficient time, the world would ultimately be reduced to a small extremely dense and hard spherical drop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Carlito Carvalhosa\u2019s first three-dimensional works of the mid-1990s were hollow cylinders of wax which he left to wilt while they hardened, so as to generate unassertive, staggering, half-melted forms. At times, in order to ensure that the sculpture did not entirely fall apart, Carlito had to hold them with his arms, embracing the wax cylinder until it cooled sufficiently. In a catalogue for a 1995 exhibition at the Banco do Brasil Cultural Centre in Rio de Janeiro, there is such a picture of the artist, intertwined with the sculpture in an uncomfortable position, as if he were transmitting the upright condition of the human body to the wax, while at the same time receiving its softness and tendency to wilt. Indeed, many of Carlito Carvalhosa\u2019s works suggest a possible fall. On some occasions, they are on the point of collapsing; on others, they give the impression that left to their own devices, they would continue flowing downwards forever. The work of the artist is thus to halt this fall. The question is when and how.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Falling, crumbling, collapsing are direct intransitive verbs: they belong to the realm of necessity. Building oneself up, raising oneself are reflexive acts of will. In order to achieve this, they demand that the I splits into a soul which orders and a body which obeys (counterevidence: when voluntary, downward movements also require a reflexive pronoun: to throw oneself, to precipitate oneself). The seventy posts at MAC Ibirapuera certainly do fall, but they may also be erecting themselves, as the artist himself has suggested in interviews. Indeed, we may imagine them in an upward movement, even if it demands some effort. The choice is ours, but the fact is that we do not know. In terms of perception, the work is perplexing: we cannot immediately determine whether things have stopped moving or whether it is our vision that has choked, like a slide stuck in a projector. Evidently, what we are seeing is just a moment extracted from a continuous motion, which sooner or later will be resumed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In this way, the meaning of the work is not determined so much by a voluntary and decisive act, which opposes the passivity of materials, as the feeling that it is just a temporary gesture, after which nature should resume its course. And yet, paradoxically, this gesture becomes eternal, things are locked in an uncomfortable position for an indefinite time, which perhaps corresponds to the time of our presence, as in that child\u2019s game in which players, when looked at, must remain immobile. The hope to which the title alludes seems to be theirs, not ours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The paradox of the immobility of the transient is certainly not specific just to Carvalhosa\u2019s work, but to all art, if not to every form. Every formalization is an act of haughtiness, and it is natural for it to disintegrate. In Carvalhosa\u2019s works, the question seems to acquire a more intense restlessness, which makes it central. There are not many works by other artists in which it becomes as obvious that to formalize is to staunch a material which is seeping, to establish a horizontal cut in a descent which is slow, but which cannot be stopped forever. Carlito Carvalhosa\u2019s work speaks of the uncomfortable coexistence of time and eternity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The predominant materials used in the 1990s are already significant: wax, plaster, glass, a slippery white porcelain, literally bathed in light, grease trapped by glass, which prevents it from sliding. All are fluids which acquire form by solidifying, or which are kept \u201cin shape\u201d by external agents. Plasters, particularly prevalent at the end of that decade, demonstrate their liquid origin in the tameness of their surface, which is sensitive to the slightest crease in the mold. But they are then segmented by straight line cuts, and the segments are superimposed in skewed fashion, so that a part of the base of the blocks remains in balance. The elegance which could characterize each block of plaster, almost a classic drapery, is denied by this game of skewed cuts and superpositions. With a lightness of surfaces and weight of the volumes, solid and liquid coexist in the same body. What is most important to the argument which I am attempting to develop here is the precariousness of the supports, the eagerness with which, behind their quiet appearance, the upper blocks strive to reach the floor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Moreover, the fact that this is a central issue for Carlito is evident in a slightly later work Favor n\u00e3o tocar [Please do not touch] (S\u00e3o Paulo, Centro Maria Antonia, 2004). In this, the gypsum block no longer rests on other blocks, but is stuck halfway up the pillars of the room. As far as I can recall, this is the first work in which the artist, an architect by training, deals with the structure of the architectural space. Indeed, the room, in a very old and heavily renovated building, is characterized by an excessive number of pillars relative to the area, arranged in disorderly fashion. On the other hand, a work of these dimensions would be too heavy for the structure of the building if supported directly on the floor. Placed in this way, as if it had become stuck as it fell, the block appeared to exercise (as it indeed exercised) a constant downward pressure, even more on account of its soft and almost gelatinous appearance: on this occasion there was no horizontal straight cut.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The relationship with the pillars evidently makes Favor n\u00e3o tocar a close relative of Sala de espera. In both cases, the pillars or columns establish a verticality which is abstract, since it is not directed. These open the rhythm within which the story runs, but they are not the story, but at most its frame. The story is everything which walks, stumbles, falls or rises between them. At the same time, when ideal space and real movement enter into contact, they contaminate each other. The columns are involved in the movement of plaster and the wood, but this is a paralyzed movement, suspended on the timelessness of the columns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There is a painting by Raphael, the Deposition, which comes to my mind when I think of these installations. In it, Christ\u2019s body is heavy matter loaded into a white sheet which, in its grave curve, recalls the plaster of Favor n\u00e3o tocar. Two figures support it: one, with a very human expression and movement twisted by the effort, attempts to go backwards up a stone step; the other, who is young and with firm legs, is the only one whose hair is ruffled and whose clothes are raised by a breeze, imperceptible to the others. This figure is customarily thought to be an angel. Surrounded by this breeze, which is his alone, he takes part in the story but at the same time, belongs to another place. Becoming human, the angel makes the whole scene divine, ensuring that the entire picture remains in balance between the ideal and the real. The columns of the MAC and the pillars of Maria Antonia take part in the work, but belong to another time. (Raphael\u2019s picture is a work of his youth: the relationship between the two worlds still has something unresolved. At a later date, in the apartments of Julius II, the artist would learn how to make the transition without fissures, but it is the fissure which is of interest here).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
New poems continue to be made from fragments of ancient verses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suspension is the compromise between immobility and falling. From a certain point of view, it is only the starting point of the fall. From another, it takes on the task of carrying a body which has already fallen. In J\u00e1 estava assim quando cheguei [It was already like that when I arrived] (MAM\/RJ, 2006), a copy in plaster of Sugarloaf Mountain is hung upside down by wooden boards and cargo slings. In this case, the relationship with the architecture is complex: suspending itself from the rafters of the roof, the installation follows the structure of the building, which is entirely suspended from the same beams; it reproduces, in inverted form, a fragment of the landscape perceived through the windows as if these were a huge optical chamber; in its materials, it articulates the subtle interplay of the materials of which the room is made: concrete on the floor, exposed concrete on the walls, plaster on the ceiling and on the walls of the mezzanine. Perhaps it was the relationship between the plaster and concrete, with its visible marks of planks, which suggested the contrast to Carlito between the great white mass, similar to a thick drop which has just fallen away from the ceiling, and the wood which sustains it. But it is a fact that the sustaining structure is visible here for the first time and that the wood appears, if I\u2019m not mistaken, for the first time, as an important element in the artist\u2019s work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Wood is an ambiguous material. While it is growing, it is a living thing. When it dies, it does not disappear: it becomes gross matter, like a stone. While alive, it has a sense of position and direction: its roots are sunk and its branches rise, without ever erring: it is impossible to plant a seed upside down. When dead, it maintains variable density and weight, but as if insane and directionless, as is the case of the posts in Sala de espera. Installations by Carlito Carvalhosa subsequent to J\u00e1 estava assim quando cheguei play with the two aspects: posts suspended between living trees in the garden of the Museu da Casa Brasileira [Museum of the Brazilian house] (Voc\u00ea tem raz\u00e3o [You\u2019re right], S\u00e3o Paulo, 2009); poles cluttering the halls of the Pal\u00e1cio da Aclama\u00e7\u00e3o in Salvador, but also living trees suspended in the entrance hall, feeding on the earth stuck to the roots through a jute bag (Roteiro para visita\u00e7\u00e3o [Visiting Schedule], 2010).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Wood, like the fabric, is fibrous and not homogeneous like gypsum and wax. Carlito Carvalhosa\u2019s works with fabrics (starting from Apagador [Eraser], Salvador, Museum of Modern Art of Bahia, 2008) are contemporary, or even slightly earlier than those centered on the use of wood. Unlike the dead wood, in the fabric, the fibers are mutually supportive and constitute a weft. On descending, the cloths exhibit a self-control which transforms falling into fitting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The cloth also insulates and is a curtain. It replaces the abstract space with another one, which is even more abstract, because even the hard consistency of the walls is abolished. It is a space made of breath and light. In order to ensure that there is nothing natural about the light, Carlito places fluorescent lamps behind the veils (Faz parte [It happens], S\u00e3o Paulo, Galeria Millan and Gabinete de Arte Raquel Arnaud, 2008; A soma dos dias [Sum of days], S\u00e3o Paulo, Pinacoteca do Estado, 2010; Sum of Days, MoMA, 2011, and others). The cloths are nevertheless fixed above and loose below: they also fall, even if they belong more to the air than to the earth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Even when the lamps are not shrouded by curtains (e.g. in Melhor Assim [Better like that], S\u00e3o Paulo, cultural SOSO + Space, 2010), they do not illuminate the space, but abolish it. They transform spatial measures into time, into rhythmic scansions. Unlike what happens in the sculptures of Dan Flavin, they are not objectified light, but energy which fights against gravity, they blot out the walls and rise from the floor, like the installation at the Eva Klabin Foundation (Regra de Dois [Rule of Two], Rio de Janeiro, 2011), when a part of the house was flooded with light and the furniture was raised and supported on glass cups. The glass transmitted the light, but also denounced the fragility of that levitation, an alien abduction of the bourgeois, refined and pompous room. When they return to the ground, the items of furniture will not remember anything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In modern art, the king of levitation was Calder. In Calder\u2019s mobiles, the utopia of including movement in form, not by mechanical procedures, but by a kind of perfection of its nature, reaches its peak. Bodies explore their own weight in order to cease having weight and gravity is transformed into a system of equivalences in which everything, even if it changes position, remains where it is. There is no such illusion in Sala de espera. Weight and shape are irreconcilable poles between which we exist and only by recognizing the distance between the two of them can wait become significant and form expressive. To the pragmatic optimism of the American, Carlito Carvalhosa counterposes a certain Portuguese melancholy. Only the direction has changed: from the horizon, beyond which, for many centuries, there was nothing, to the center, which is also the end, of the earth, of this material which continues to flow and which the artist merely limits himself to holding for a while.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The reflection introduces a moment of immobility in the continuous motion. The interruption of the flow brings together spectators and things, with the same attitude of surprise. While Carlito Carvalhosa\u2019s installations are sometimes seductive, unlike many recent installations, they do not exhibit any suggestion of playfulness. They are not an interaction but a pause. It is during this wait that the noise of the world, like a buzzing, can be heard, softly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1<\/sup>I withdraw this information from Liliane Benetti\u2019s doctoral thesis, Angles of a Slow Walk: Exercises of Containment, Reiteration, and Saturation in the Work of Bruce Nauman<\/em> (S\u00e3o Paulo, ECA\/USP, 2013), which in turn refers to Wallace V. Masuko, Henri Robert Marcel Duchamp: Erre<\/em> (Master\u2019s thesis, S\u00e3o Paulo, ECA\/USP. 2012).<\/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-4093","texto","type-texto","status-publish","hentry","decada-6"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/acervocarlitocarvalhosa.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/texto\/4093","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\/4093\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4095,"href":"https:\/\/acervocarlitocarvalhosa.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/texto\/4093\/revisions\/4095"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/acervocarlitocarvalhosa.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"decada","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acervocarlitocarvalhosa.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/decada?post=4093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}