For almost 3 decades, in the various places where I have lived, I have carried with me a painting in encaustic by Carlito Carvalhosa. At present, it is in my study at home, standing on my left in parallel to my line of sight. I am a night owl and like indirect light, with the exception of a table lamp. The painting, so to speak, is partially in the shade. It was painted on a wooden base used to make a door. Placed horizontally, its features change, but it still retains the thickness and dimensions of the wood which was entirely filled with yellow encaustic, albeit with the edges left without pigmentation. It is a precise yellow, without saturation, and has aged somewhat together with myself. In the painting, the years have lasted as if they bore witness to my own. Adorno says that it is not every day that a work of art opens to us. What has happened with Carlito Carvalhosa\u2019s encaustic is no different. Indeed, for some time, the access to his art was blocked for a practical reason, due to the warping of the wood. Carlito picked up the encaustic, took it to his studio and criss-crossed its back with iron. He himself put it back on the wall and since then, it has been rigid. This was 25 years ago and three houses back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To Adorno\u2019s dictum we may add that works of art in a house tend to open to their residents even less than works outside the home. We get used to them and habit, with its routines, is not a reliable ally of art. Since the painting is currently not very well lit, I enjoy it even less. But in addition to these three conditions, the right time to which Adorno refers, the habit to be overcome at home and the reduced lighting, there is a fourth condition in the yellow encaustic of Carlito Carvalhosa which prevents it from opening to an aesthetic perception and drawing me away from everyday tasks. If we may say so, it was made in closed form. The encaustic is massive. There are some subtle vertical creases which divide it and for the remainder, there are scratches everywhere, albeit which are also subtle. The yellowness of the work is what predominates. It isn\u2019t a painting that I can decide to look at and by using tricks that we learn over time, am able to \u201copen\u201d for my own pleasure. It has something of the stationary, of the contracted in its mass, so that it is not easy to appreciate. A yellow black hole. But then someone arrives, or I open the window more or I fiddle with the lights and suddenly all or part of the yellowness, a scratch, pulls me away from my everyday routine and becomes autonomous. Its scratches reign over the yellow like the first human scratches, or, on another occasion, like in the luminosity of the small yellow wall of Vermeer\u2019s View of Delft described by Proust. Primitive or sophisticated to the extreme, the yellow glitters and emerges from its state of anaesthesia, gaining an aesthetic dimension which appeared to be eternally asleep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This counterpoint between the anaesthetic and the aesthetic is at the core of Carlito Carvalhosa\u2019s poetics. I enter the gallery and there is a white tissue descending from the roof on my left which prevents me from accessing the gallery space and on the right, there is a mirror. What is this? Like in my encaustic, everything is anaesthetised. But I don\u2019t know how many steps forward, or with which leg in the air and I don\u2019t know, because everything was so rapid and suddenly, my movement airs the space and the tissue moves, lightly but no less slowly, as in an adagio. My memory is one of time in slow motion, in which there is time for me to insert right now, not the story of scratches and yellows in art, but this incomparable story of drapery and its movements in the history of art. And it is my body, for an instant, an unmeasurable instant, that drapes the space, in a type of profane and secular inversion, of the revelation of the body of a Greek god through the folds of the drapery which shows in it the body and its movements. A small but great epiphany. It moves ceaselessly, slowly, opening itself and rising to the space in my memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The intense aesthetic, which suddenly arises from the anaesthetised, can be described in many works by Carlito Carvalhosa. But I do not wish to go beyond a brief note. I am travelling. I\u2019m not in S\u00e3o Paulo. I nevertheless receive photographs by e-mail of the exhibition in Seoul which Carlito Carvalhosa sent to me two days ago. In the space of the Kukje Gallery, large wooden trunks are laid out in a manner similar to that of the previous exhibition at the new Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC) of S\u00e3o Paulo. In the first photograph, I recognise the similarity of the exhibitions. With the pardon of repetition, everything is halted, inert and as if thrown into a place where it hardly fits. But as I look at the photographs, the situations change. It is not the light and slow raising of the tissue which strikes me as in the previous works which closed off the space through fabrics, but flashes, markings in the space and of the space, as if they had jumped out of the canvas of a painting by Malevich with many diagonals. Fluttering or marking, a delay or instant, in the same way, the aesthetic arrives and overcomes the anaesthetic. Is it possible that it won\u2019t come? Evidently. It is always possible. And in the works of Carlito Carvalhosa, even more so. They take risks in being simple things more than is usual in contemporary art. But if the risk is overcome, like an arriving grace, the art crackles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There is something new, even if the poetics is the same, in these two series of the more recent works by Carlito Carvalhosa. Not only the movements of the case, but also the moving through space with the body are required for the inert to gain life. There is something of the old \u201cparticipation of the spectator\u201d here. The expression, from the end of the 1950s and the start of the 1960s, is ambiguous. The spectator always took part in the art. But having discounted the ambiguity, the idea that the spectator is the author of the work is resumed, albeit subtly. The installations are present and sufficiently drawn for us to feel that the author is the artist. The role of giving art to an art, which in fact has already received it, is left to the spectator. This illusion of creating the movement of the cloth which moves slowly or of the trunks which mark each other in an instant is not entirely illusory, however, even if entirely prepared by the artist, without ideologies of the spectator-creator. This leaving of a part for the spectator, this giving him the aesthetic moment slightly more than usual, is a corollary of the anaesthetic aspect of the works. Taking from the work and from the artist to give to the spectator (even if this is entirely a decision of the artist) is, let\u2019s say, a real illusion. My movements slowly raised the cloth. It was memorable. I was gentle. I left habitual time for a while. It lasted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I return from my travels and following Carlito Carvalhosa\u2019s suggestion, I go to see the new exhibition of trunks at the new MAC of S\u00e3o Paulo. I had not yet been able to see it and I catch the exhibition a day before it closes. What a welcome suggestion! The change in aspects of the same work, which I felt looking at the photographs of the exhibition in the Kujke Gallery, is present. But what I saw as flashes and markings was given to me by the succession of photographs which came in the e-mail. The changes in features, which are rapidly deleted and then re-emerge, came to me filtered through photographic language. Wandering through one of these exhibitions in the flesh is something else. I didn\u2019t go to Seoul. I have never been to Seoul. I could only see the exhibition at the MAC live, in the same way that I did not see all of the assemblies of tissues surrounding the environments of Carlito Carvalhosa\u2019s exhibitions. And now, it is no longer flashes or markings which I see, but an orchestration of trunks which reveals to those walking through the exhibitions an unveiling of things in space and with this, the space itself: heights, widths, depths. They reveal this to the walker and only to the walker. As in \u201cReveries of a Solitary Walker\u201d by Rousseau, the succession of differences merge together, as if they were a long and uninterrupted travelling which obeys everything from the smallest movements and looks by me to the broadest and most extensive ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After having seen and reconstructed it in my memory, the exhibition recalls trunks from a felling arranged almost at random on the floor of a forest. There is even a more open stretch in the succession of trunks, as if it were a clearing. In the same way that there is an untransposable moment, in which we have to bow down in order to pass under a trunk and move on. Using Niemeyer\u2019s pillars as a support, the trunks are arranged as if they were beams brought to the architecture of the already existing pillars. They are largely in a position closer to the horizon, albeit an inclined one. On each one of the many pillars a set number of trunks huddle together and are launched into the air and into space. This is not strictly speaking a felling. There are very few trunks which are actually supported on the ground. Only these are heavy. The others are light, they launched themselves into space. They lance the space. And everything happens, to a large extent, at the height of the spectator\u2019s gaze. It is not strictly speaking a felling, since there is no floor. The situation in a forest is not replicated, except for the intertwining of the trunks. Arranged in the air, they are poetic, as one of the most beautiful titles of a book of Brazilian poetry is poetic, if the real felling which does not take place were the work of a rancher. As in the title by Drummond, it remains a work of someone who farms, but, as in the title, the work of a Rancher of the Air [Fazendeiro do Ar]. Lifted, not fallen, and raised for the third time. These used to be trunks of trees, and the physiognomy of each one, with the scratches and lumps of each one, even barks of the tree which each one once was, still retains the aspects of living wood, of its marks, its nodules, its smoothnesses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Erected for the third time, because, in addition to the natural world, they retain the physiognomy of the posts which they once were. What was vertical in nature, which did not change much, which was torn from nature, still emulates it in the verticality of a post. Pieces of iron for conducting wires are everywhere. These are trunks, but were used as posts. This is a stance which the exhibition disassembles and reassembles in the air in a poetic way. A forest in the air, for each nucleus or bundle of trunks attached to a pillar, the trunks separate from each other, moving as we move. If there are works which illustrate the dialogical and no longer solipsistic relationship of the contemporary spectator with the contemporary artwork, this is definitely one of them. As we move around it, each bundle of trunks leaves the others static, untouched. The relationship between the anaesthetic and the aesthetic in the poetics of Carlito Carvalhosa gives us another key here to understand it. It translates into the relationship of far and near. It is at close hand that everything moves, that the section of a trunk in my face shows itself as if it were a form by Arp. Walking is necessary. Approaching is necessary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And it is on walking in the space of the mezzanine above the exhibition that on looking sideways and downwards, we perceive how our horizontal shift causes a rise in each of the nearest nuclei of trunks, a half-opening, and the sum of the two movements is a kind of wave, a rising and falling of bundles, as if we were on the sea and not on dry land. Water, its waves, air, its launching into the air, land, the land of the trunks which once were, the elements combine as we move. It would merely remain to set fire to everything, if it were not for the fact that the trembling of the space, as we walk in the outlines of the trunks, establishes itself as something like a flame. And I confess here, that I did not expect to bring up the four elements. I already write in S\u00e3o Paulo and in my office. The encaustic painting by Carlito Carvalhosa is on my left. I throw the light which focuses on my desk towards the ceiling. With this indirect light, I approach the painting, inert and waiting for me. I move closer and everything begins to pulsate. Like the trunks, like the tissue, like something at hand, that we could touch, but which the gaze already touches in this counterpoint of the anaesthetic and aesthetic, of the far and of the near, and which is now a counterpoint of the tactile and of the visual. This air, which my body displaced and which raised the tissue in the gallery, which made me see it, is of a tactile nature. On seeing it, I perceived that through the air I touched it, the air. And I was touched.<\/p>\n\n\n
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