Carlito Carvalhosa, A metade do dobro, 2024-2025, Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo, installation view
2025. Carlito Carvalhosa
The first retrospective exhibition of Carlito Carvalhosa, who passed away in 2021 at the age of fifty-nine, presented four decades of thought-provoking, experimental work encompassing paintings, sculptures, and installations. The ambitious show, “A metade do dobro” (The Half of the Double), demonstrated Carvalhosa’s fascination with thresholds, mutability, and impurity. His participation in Casa 7—a group of young artists who directly or indirectly shaped the artistic trends of São Paulo in the 1980s and ’90s—proved to be seminal. The group’s works emphasized material experimentation, often leading beyond the boundaries of painting—a backlash, of sorts, to the Conceptual art boom in Brazil of the ’70s, focusing on nontraditional media. The young São Paulo painters of the ’80s were also intensely receptive to Philip Guston’s late figurative work, as we see in Carvalhosa’s P05/84, 1984, a large-scale enamel painting on canvas whose stacked, deformed volumes, paint-handling techniques, and incisive brushstrokes recall such canvases as Guston’s City Limits, 1969, or Back View, 1977.
Carvalhosa’s works are full of such echoes, stymieing any desire to make out a sequential order of influencer and influenced—more often, they reflect commonalities of thought and practice, and the tremendous diversity of Carvalhosa’s interests. His faience ceramics, for example, can evoke Tunga’s “Morfológicas” series, 2011–16. A resin, marble, and wood sculpture in the shape of an upside-down mountain, Já estava assim quando eu cheguei (It Was Already Like That When I Arrived), 2006/2015, resembles Tunga’s sculptures from the series “From ‘La Voie Humide’” (From “The Humid Way”), 2010–15. Carvalhosa’s stoneware ceramics from 2000 resonate with the long rolls of clay Anna Maria Maiolino has been making repeatedly since 1994. The substantial connections with the work of Paulo Monteiro, also a member of Casa 7, were expressed in Carvalhosa’s room-filling installation Qualquer direção (Any Direction), 2011. On the left wall, aluminum mirror plates with reflection-distorting positive and negative dents made by percussion are similar to Monteiro’s works from 1987, in which an aluminum rectangular plate is pierced in multiple places by a bent single bar of the same material. On the opposite wall were oil-and-wax paintings on mirrored aluminum that feature cytoplasmic color fields, which are also characteristic of Monteiro’s work. A concern, shared by both artists, with variations in seriality was evident in the sequence of slightly misaligned fluorescent tubes that occupied the floor and the back wall.
Central to the exhibition was a room with encaustic paintings from 1992 and robust wax or wax-and-clay sculptures from 1995. These remarkable sculptures seem like empty cocoons. Both the paintings on the wall and the sculptures on pedestals hold a quality that’s not only material but mental: opacity. These works—the most important of the exhibition, as they sum up Carvalhosa’s practice regarding material and process—have an almost tactile visuality due to their irregular and protuberant surfaces. Wax encompasses paradoxical aspects of his poetics, being simultaneously translucent and opaque, molten in appearance yet solid, taking forms that seem geometric in origin but distorted in result. It is hard to tell how and why they were made; they seem to resist our urge to interpret them.
Édouard Glissant, in his Poetics of Relation (1990), defends the right to opacity, advocating for a form of existence that opposes the transparency demanded by Western thought. In the paradigm he proposes, singularities coexist, hierarchies collapse, and sequential lines of artistic influence reveal themselves to be artificial and deceptive. This thought also animates Carvalhosa’s oeuvre. Through dialogue with his artistic peers and reflections within his own multifaceted production, Carvalhosa incessantly finds the infinite within a detail and the details within the infinite—portraying, indeed, “the half of the double.”
Text originally published in Artforum, vol. 63, no. 8, April 2025
Carvalhosa’s works are full of such echoes, stymieing any desire to make out a sequential order of influencer and influenced—more often, they reflect commonalities of thought and practice, and the tremendous diversity of Carvalhosa’s interests. His faience ceramics, for example, can evoke Tunga’s “Morfológicas” series, 2011–16. A resin, marble, and wood sculpture in the shape of an upside-down mountain, Já estava assim quando eu cheguei (It Was Already Like That When I Arrived), 2006/2015, resembles Tunga’s sculptures from the series “From ‘La Voie Humide’” (From “The Humid Way”), 2010–15. Carvalhosa’s stoneware ceramics from 2000 resonate with the long rolls of clay Anna Maria Maiolino has been making repeatedly since 1994. The substantial connections with the work of Paulo Monteiro, also a member of Casa 7, were expressed in Carvalhosa’s room-filling installation Qualquer direção (Any Direction), 2011. On the left wall, aluminum mirror plates with reflection-distorting positive and negative dents made by percussion are similar to Monteiro’s works from 1987, in which an aluminum rectangular plate is pierced in multiple places by a bent single bar of the same material. On the opposite wall were oil-and-wax paintings on mirrored aluminum that feature cytoplasmic color fields, which are also characteristic of Monteiro’s work. A concern, shared by both artists, with variations in seriality was evident in the sequence of slightly misaligned fluorescent tubes that occupied the floor and the back wall.
Central to the exhibition was a room with encaustic paintings from 1992 and robust wax or wax-and-clay sculptures from 1995. These remarkable sculptures seem like empty cocoons. Both the paintings on the wall and the sculptures on pedestals hold a quality that’s not only material but mental: opacity. These works—the most important of the exhibition, as they sum up Carvalhosa’s practice regarding material and process—have an almost tactile visuality due to their irregular and protuberant surfaces. Wax encompasses paradoxical aspects of his poetics, being simultaneously translucent and opaque, molten in appearance yet solid, taking forms that seem geometric in origin but distorted in result. It is hard to tell how and why they were made; they seem to resist our urge to interpret them.
Édouard Glissant, in his Poetics of Relation (1990), defends the right to opacity, advocating for a form of existence that opposes the transparency demanded by Western thought. In the paradigm he proposes, singularities coexist, hierarchies collapse, and sequential lines of artistic influence reveal themselves to be artificial and deceptive. This thought also animates Carvalhosa’s oeuvre. Through dialogue with his artistic peers and reflections within his own multifaceted production, Carvalhosa incessantly finds the infinite within a detail and the details within the infinite—portraying, indeed, “the half of the double.”
Text originally published in Artforum, vol. 63, no. 8, April 2025
Carlito Carvalhosa, A metade do dobro, 2024-2025, Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo, installation views