The earliest human shelters, based on assumptions and knowledge, were stone grottos, natural caves used by people or larger groups for protection against inclement weather. It is believed that the first materials used by man to build his own shelters some time later were stone and wood. The stone formed solid pile-up masonry walls, and wooden logs, spaced at intervals, held the straw thatching in place. Much later on, Greek columns made from marble pay homage to this rustic, natural early architecture, as the leaves that once crowned the wooden columns were sculpted onto stone \u2013 especially in the Corinthian capitals \u2013, like non-whittled down remainders of the tree itself in the trunks of those primitive buildings that were once imagined. Thus being, once all technical restrictions have been overcome, art codifies this entire historical genealogy with \u201cgrace,\u201d symbolically bridging nature and culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But why allude to this issue in a text about the works of Carlito Carvalhosa? Because it seems to me one of the crucial aspects of his work resides in the questioning of this symbolic transition, undoing its evolutionary linearity to the benefit of a more horizontal circularity. Hence the appearance, in exhibition venues, of time-worn wooden logs, painted or numbered. These logs that once were trunks have also been lighting posts on streets, and now reappear as works of art, in the form of intrusive elements that obstruct the halls, making it difficult for people to pass through. They are such intrusive elements that they even burst through the walls, going across them. This wooden forest, however, is far removed from other more expressionistic Brazilian art references, such as Frans Krajcberg or Henrique Oliveira, to name two examples from distant generations. In Carvalhosa\u2019s case, there seems to be neither the evolution from nature into culture, as in the paradigmatic case of the Greek columns, nor an expressionistic return to natural presence that alludes to a state of potential return, albeit allegorical. This is, first and foremost, a silent, circular passage where things transmute without losing their name: wood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As Vil\u00e9m Flusser explains, the Latin word \u201cmatter\u201d results from the Romans\u2019 attempt to translate the Greek term hyl\u00e9, which originally means wood. Not wood in a broad sense, but the wood found concretely stockpiled at carpenters\u2019 workshops, designating something amorphous in nature, as opposed to the notion of form (morph\u00e9). Therefore, for the Greek, Hyl\u00e9 is the amorphous world of natural phenomena, the material world behind which eternal forms are concealed. Matter is the upholstery, the perishable filling to the indestructible form, because that wood is bound to end someday, whereas the idea of a table or a chair, on the other hand, is certainly not. Going back to Carvalhosa\u2019s works, what seems to be there, on the contrary, is the vicious circle of matter, which conserves itself despite the vulnerability of the form that informs it (trunk, lighting post, work of art etc.). Appropriation, usage, disposal, recycling. Once the various forms of practical existence of those wooden logs have been exhausted, they reappear as a work of art in which the forest has changed its meaning, lying horizontally and tipping into diagonals, often opposing the verticality of the building\u2019s pillars (also cylindrical, but white), as was the case with the \u201cSala de espera\u201d (Waiting room) exhibition held at USP\u2019s Museum of Contemporary Art in 2013. Considering the medium\u2019s boom and the environmental spatialization of artwork that took place for the past 50 years, these strange forests by Carlito Carvalhosa can be seen as dialogues with Mira Schendel\u2019s Sarrafos. For aren\u2019t these trunks\/tilted posts that go through walls and balance themselves unstably akin to environment-scale prolongations of the wood strips that leap from within white canvases before sinking into them again?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Perhaps one of the main constants of Carvalhosa\u2019s later works, one that is fairly present in this show, is the modification of the regular position of things. Trunks tilt, lighting fixtures are moved to the ground or the walls, and drinking and wine glasses stick to the floor or the walls. In other words, the vertical and horizontal directions become shuffled, which to an extent corresponds to the growing dissolution we experience between art and life. Ever since Robert Rauschenberg, in 1955, laced his bed, quilt and pillow with paint and raised them onto a vertical position \u2013 the contemplative position of art, abandoning the horizontality of day-to-day actions: sleeping, sitting, placing objects on the table \u2013, leaning it onto the wall, this has become a central issue for art, incorporating the spectator into the artwork in a structural way. However, these pieces by Carvalhosa contain something surrealistic (Escher- or Magritte-like), in the way the ceiling, wall and flooring mutually contaminate one another, and in the way commonplace objects such as glasses end up elsewhere without losing their recognizable identities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By the way, this very insistence in conserving the identity of things strongly sets Carvalhosa\u2019s current output apart from the material, gestural expressionism that marked the production of the Casa 7 group, of which he was a member in the late 1980s and early 90s. For at least over ten years now, Carlito Carvalhosa has chosen to preserve, through a certain degree of literality, the external identities of objects in his work. Hence the marked expressive prudishness in his work, a case in point being the very title of this exhibition, precau\u00e7\u00e3o de contato (contact warning).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the installation \u201cRegra de dois\u201d (2011), shown at Rio de Janeiro\u2019s Funda\u00e7\u00e3o Eva Klabin, pieces of furniture made from dark, heavy, highly adorned wood, preexistent in those formerly domestic settings, are lifted off the ground by drinking and wine glasses that support them in a vertiginously unstable manner. An approximate comparison would be a building standing not on pillars \u2013 the equivalent of furniture legs \u2013 but on fragile glass walls or columns, in a clear tectonic paradox. In this installation, Carvalhosa further highlights the sense of ethereal suspension of the furniture by setting up lines of fluorescent lamps on the floor, creating a cold, immaterial halo that seems to eliminate the ground altogether, and all that is left is chairs and other low pieces of furniture, as well as drinking glasses, loose in space. In fact, the idea of contact here is reduced to a minimal dimension, whereas the objects keep their formal integrity intact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This same issue manifests in the paintings, albeit differently. Here, the oil paint glides smoothly over the mirrored aluminum sheets in an aversive contact that does not sediment itself. Carved out in negative, the designs are luminous reflective openings upon these blue masses. The contact warning here is also a reduction of connections, an allusion to a world where things (and people) no longer attach themselves to one another; they just glide and mutually reflect. A world where floor has become wall, wall has become ceiling and so forth. A world, therefore, where things glide and escape their habitual places, changing position, dodging constantly.<\/p>\n\n\n
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