Recent Artwork
My recent body of work, titled Les Fleurs du Mal (homage to Baudelaire), is a take on the concept of manicured gardening following up on Baudelaire’s critique of modern life. Of course, my reality is no longer Baudelaire’s, but it shares a similar disillusionment with the concept of controlled spaces in modern, post-modern, and globalized societies. The nature in my work is derived from the concept of controlled gardens, here perceived as dystopian; some self-destructive engineered environments, others mutating after endangered by chemical landfills. In 2021, I read that butterflies in the Amazon began losing their colors as they were surrounded by dilapidated construction sites in which the only color to be seen was grey. I still remember that this news made me cry. My paintings not only attempt to denounce these abuses of power against nature, but are also a reminder that nature’s beauty is healing, not just its own environments, but also the emotions and natures of all living beings.
My artwork is not scientific but rather emotional. It is also about energy. Certain experiences or emotions create energy, and energy is transmutable in various forms, through gestures on a canvas, through colors, through the flow of movements and awareness. Emotions work hand-in-hand with energy. Through energy, an artist can distill emotions into exquisite and fantastic expression.
My move to Upstate New York in the winter of 2020, during the Covid 19 Pandemic, was how I began learning about nature and realized that it is not only extremely rich in poetic language but also in aesthetic inspiration. I don’t mean copying nature, but being in nature, noticing it, learning from its mysteries, transmuting it into expression. During my first summer Upstate, I knew nothing about gardening, but began cultivating a garden nonetheless, which at first had only weeds. Weeds had flowers and some of them were beautiful. Although neighbors helped me to understand the difference between weeds and cultivated flowers and plants, I decided not to follow their program completely, announcing that I was happy to have a couple of milkweeds and would create a sanctuary for Monarch butterflies. That idea began taking off in the summer of 2022, as from two milkweeds I suddenly had 12 without ever planting them. This and other experiences led me to realize how beauty reveals itself in many forms and tones.
In 2021, I was working on a series of paintings based on ancient and prehistoric script, again not as a science or as archaeological research, but as a way of rethinking or reconsidering the nature of writing not as programmed by socialization or as algorithmic form, but rather as a more inventive and imaginary ability, as a way to redefine unknown language meanings. The series on script as images are mostly explorations on various methods of writing, from ancient writing to sigillography, occult writing but also the whole concept of pre-langue, attempting to arrive at language in a genealogical manner. I was mixing concepts of pictographs (ancient Sumerian before the one known as Hieratic style of writing, before Demotic and the hieroglyphics of the Ancient Egyptians) with what I conceived as potential writing signs. As an artist, I give myself permission to redefine these earlier pictographs through my own imaginary. By attempting to redefine the nature of writing, I experienced rethinking nature itself.
Color is fundamental in my painting practice, and a part of my interest in anthroposophy and other spiritual theories. As synesthesia alines the choice of music the choice of color and gestural form, it also heightens emotions that ignite higher states of consciousness. As an art historian, I go back to ancient art techniques to consider color and light, as the brilliant colors of the Egyptian Amarna period (1353-36 BCE), in which pigments were enmeshed with glass (from crystals in sand) and clay, creating a rougher fabric in which the translucency of colors and their divinely symbolic images would emerge. My interest in both color and line are explored in ways that they become interchangeable through a feeling of shared transparency, taking into account the effect of color blindness, which could also be transmitted (in some cases) through an hallucinatory state, although in my case it is based on the perception of different aura tones from meditation.
In my paintings of late 2021, I am also playing with the notion of the support, envisioning the role of the line and of color beyond the canvas while on the canvas. Back to Walter Benjamin’s concept of originality which once was ascribed to the canvas as the auratic window for its realization, while then shifting with the development of photography and mass production to emphasize the importance of art in the midst of social interaction, I use the same notion in my work to rethink the role of abstraction, imagination, and spirituality, asking for a return to the aura, but not the same aura of Neoclassicism, but an even older one, the equation of language as image and image as language, a potential for a new way of thinking the role of language itself.
The ability to rethink the role of abstraction in our communication system is extremely important for the survival of the relationship between art and language as a creative feature of humanity. In my work, I see a strong relationship between pictorial image and language, color and form, surface and support, allowing various ways of redefining connection and possibilities between language and visual form. While anachronistic and congruous forms and lines are strained in balance and friction, they can create juxtapositions between proximity and disparity in which distinct patterns emerge in a collision course. Flatness of color can be superimposed by spatial proximity while displaced in conversion with spatial irrelevance. Inspired by Benjamin, I see the art process as a composition of mediums: the medium of color, the medium of the mark, composed and decomposed merely as a means of communication. This conversions of mediums create the blueprint of the event in which abstract painting is everything intentional and chance, accident and interference, lining up to partake in the overall historicity of the object as result.
Exhibition "AMOR" (2016) at Oi Futuro Flamengo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Caption of work: Agnieska Polska, I am the Mouth II (2014), video.
But nothing is what it seems since in every personal fragment lies an emotional memory and a possibility, the possibility of reentering that state of mind, always differently.
My work encompasses art practices, art criticism, curating, and writing scholarly and creatively. My scholarly research has been shaped around global perspectives of art, particularly on Brazilian contemporary art, and on international interdisciplinary art and new media. My career as an artist expanded to a wider field of cultural production, pushing its boundaries by embracing challenges and obstacles, allowing constant shifting situations to provide the next step. I found this to be a constructive deconstruction of my own life. Lately, my interest in curating and scholarly writing has taken precedence, but my visual perception and creative intuition continues to nurture my method of work and the concepts that come of it. This is what I call my work. As a curator, I am often tempted to further my own views about theory and aesthetics by orchestrating the work of other artists through an intertextual set of relationships and dialogues. In my writing, I use the concept of the translator/transformer, since I am aware that nothing is absolutely original and nothing stays the same. I am interested in a form of writing that allows poetics to interfere with aesthetic theory and philosophy, reading and writing from the perspective of how I am affected, hoping that my reaction will lead to a more gratifying and insightful result. Of course, I am interested, perhaps naively, in searching for breakthroughs, but those are easier in thought than in writing, since the text seems always conditioned by other more constructed and constrictive principles, which are hard to avoid when one writes in a second language. The result is often felt between the desire to transcend translation with hybridity and a self-conscious skepticism against any form of spontaneity.
Finally, my work as a scholar deals with merging my own experience in the arts with critical theory and research. Among some of my recent research in art theory are the examination of artworks drawing from mechanisms and strategies of media cultures (e.g., dissolution, diffusion, persuasion, articulation, etc.); intersectionist aesthetic theory as a peripheral dynamics within those of dialogical practices; my work on recent shifts in perception and interactivity; and recent writings on new discursive methods in teaching.
Dr. Denise Carvalho