Carlito Carvalhosa

Nara Roesler is pleased to present Carlito Carvalhosa: Matter as Image. Works from 1987 to 2021, a solo exhibition of Brazilian artist Carlito Carvalhosa (b. 1961, São Paulo, Brazil - d. 2021, São Paulo, Brazil) curated by Luis Pérez-Oramas and the artist’s estate. The show presents a selection of works developed during each of the artist’s most defining phases, highlighting Carvalhosa’s consistent understanding of a generative dimension of matter and materiality in visual arts.

Carlito Carvalhosa lived most of his life in Rio de Janeiro, embracing the radical legacy of Brazilian artists who preceded him, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Mira Schendel, and Antonio Manuel, amongst others, whose propositions carried weight for the generations that followed them often translating into a conclusive no way out in terms of art practice. The entire repertoire of Carlito Carvalhosa’s oeuvre responded to this historical challenge, from his inception as a painter embedded in the deep sources of the formless to his striking performative installations using fabric, neon, wood, wax, mirrors, and sound.

Carlito Carvalhosa was the first Brazilian artist to occupy the Atrium of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), in New York, on the occasion of his solo presentation Sum of Days (2011). He has long been recognized as a leading figure of his generation, and has received outstanding institutional acclaim in Brazil with works in the permanent collections of Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM-SP), São Paulo, Brazil; Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (MAM Rio), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; and Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil, as well as in key private collections.

Carlito Carvalhosa was, alongside artists Nuno Ramos, Fabio Miguez, Rodrigo Andrade, and Paulo Monteiro a founding member of the group Casa 7, which embraced in Brazil the avant-garde of painting by the mid-1980s. Carvalhosa’s was among the most radical painterly investigations of that time in Latin America, notably through his early works on wax where the artist’s hand and fingers are visible as traces coming from behind, from underneath the very material support, inverting the classical proposition of painting.

The exhibition also delves into the centrality of sculpture as an expanded practice within Carvalhosa’s work, with ceramic and porcelains, ephemeral plaster sculptures as well as formless, monumental lost-waxes that Carvalhosa produced beginning in the mid-1990s. These works allowed the artist to re-visit, in continuity with his understanding of matter as a generatrix force of his work, new forms and classical typologies such as abstract draperies and imprints. His subsequent works on mirrors address the image as an inverted reflection, manifested by his reversed writing, and covered with paint. The colorful literality of forms collides with the transparency of mirrors, opacifying it. This repertoire of forms often echoes the three-dimensional volumes of his formless sculptures, waxes, and porcelains.

Lastly, Carvalhosa’s untimely passing interrupted a tireless production of serial paintings on wax where the artist stands out as a brilliant colorist, and as a contemporary master tirelessly investigating the potentiality for indexical marks. With works pertaining to each of these pillars of Carvalhosa’s production, Carlito Carvalhosa: Matter as Image. Works from 1987 to 2021 delineates the brilliant arch within which the artist relentlessly explored matter and materiality in relation to image throughout his career, uniquely embracing and transcending the radical legacies of his predecessors.

Carlito Carvalhosa’s work predominantly involves painting and sculpture. In the 1980s, Carvalhosa was a member of the São Paulo-based collective Grupo Casa 7, alongside Rodrigo Andrade, Fábio Miguez, Nuno Ramos, and Paulo Monteiro. Like his colleagues, he produced large paintings with an emphasis on pictorial gesture, an approach that was characteristic of the neo expressionist production. In the late 1980s, with the group having disintegrated, Carvalhosa began to experiment with encaustics and to make pictures using wax, either pure or mixed with pigments. In the mid-1990s, he turned to sculptures, making organic and malleable-like pieces with materials such as the so-called “lost waxes”. During this period, he also experimented with porcelain sculptures.

Carvalhosa has ascribed deep eloquence to the materiality of the media that he employed, seeking to transcend formal aspects in order to explore matters of time and space. In his practice, one encounters a tension between form and materiality through a disjunction of the visible and the tactile - what we see is not what we touch, and what we touch is not what we see. At the beginning of the 2000s, he created paintings on mirrored surfaces which, in the words of curator Paulo Venancio Filho “put our presence inside them”. Beyond Carvalhosa’s recurrent techniques and materials, the artist has also frequently experimented with objects like tissues and lamps in his creation of installations.

Carlito Carvalhosa was born in 1961 in São Paulo, Brazil and died in 2021 also in São Paulo, Brazil. Recent solo exhibitions include: I Want to Be Like You, at Galeria Nara Roesler (2019), in New York, USA; Sala de espera, at Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo (MAC USP) (2013), in São Paulo, Brazil; Sum of Days, at Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) (2011), in New York, USA; Corredor, Projeto Parede, at Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM-SP) (2008), in São Paulo, Brazil; Já estava assim quando eu cheguei, at Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (MAM Rio) (2006), in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Recent group shows include: Past/Future/Present: Contemporary Brazilian Art from MAM, at Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM-SP) (2019), in São Paulo, Brazil, and at Phoenix Art Museum (2017), in Phoenix, USA ; Troposphere – Chinese and Brazilian Contemporary Art, at Beijing Minsheng Art Museum (2017), in Beijing, China; Everything You Are, I Am Not: Latin American Contemporary Art From Tiroche Deleon Collection, at Mana Contemporary (2016), in Jersey City, USA; 30 x Bienal, at Fundação Bienal de São Paulo (2013), in São Paulo, Brazil; 11th Bienal de La Habana, Cuba (2011). His works are part of several important collections such as: Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO), Miami, USA; Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM-SP), São Paulo, Brazil; Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (MAM Rio), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil.