Artwork

The galaxy in the flower and the flower in the galaxy 1 and 2 are paintings of a new series in which the idea of the galaxy is reflected on earth’s nature. It is inspired by organic geometry seen from the concept of the mirror. However, here the mirror is neither taken from the methods of concave or convex mirrors, nor from the plane mirror which depicts the images without altering their perception. My interest here is to reimagine the mirror as from the soul, a mirror that reinvents possibilities making them malleable to one’s imagination.

This is a new series in which the idea of the galaxy is reflected on earth’s nature. It is inspired by organic geometry seen from the concept of a mirror.

My painting practice focuses on the fluidity of abstract form and its potentiality to create patterns through the juxtaposition of geometric shapes and lines, alluding to multiple ideas of space, including that of painting being a fragment of the larger reality of forms and lines beyond the parameters of a canvas. My process is intuitive and gestural, but as I work I am also in tune with various art theories that resonate to my choices and ideas. I am interested in Jungian intuitive geometries and the collective unconscious. I am also interested in Kandinsky’s concept of synesthesia, as well as El Lissitzki’s prouns, thinking of the line as an attempt to expand geometric form into visual codes beyond language. In my most recent body of work, I use concepts of excess and restriction, order and chaos, tapping onto both desires and mental conditionings, un-coding and de-coding potentialities of visual space and form. My artwork has been featured at the Fukuyama Museum in Japan, at Gallery Korea in New York, at the Bosnian Cultural Center, at the Museo Ricoleta in Buenos Ayres and at La Foundation de La Republique Argentine, at the Cite Universitaire in Paris, at the Kentler Institute and at the Artists Space in New York. My work also participated representing the United States at the 2001 Biennale Internazionale dell’Arte Contemporanea in Florence.

Earlier Artwork (1990s)

BRAINS

A way to begin

By Dr. George Nelson Preston, Ph.D.

I’m writing this, of a late summer’s afternoon, sitting with Denise Carvalho, enveloped by these works tilted or tacked against the walls, leaning on easels, askance on the floor. We converse in this virtual surround of celebration, integument, synapses, convolutions, ideation, plasma. Even the materials used to invigorate the skin of the paintings – wire mesh, silicon paste, cotton voile – are so visceral.

I want to know why she is working with the brain in its literal form as the basis for this series of abstract paintings. I remember earlier works: Indians in the rain forest, Xingu madonnas, flesh colored silhouettes of robust men challenging physical barriers of confinement. Work by a Brazilian woman who lived in a country run by soldiers who still marched and changed colors in her consciousness.

Words I had written for the painting “Temptation,” which was completed in early 1992 and exhibited that year in Buenos Aires at the “America 500” exhibition, suspended in very plastic, painterly backgrounds framed or balanced by fanciful architectural members. “…the central column: erect, masculine, architectural, abstract. The base: pelvic, feminine, organic, figurative.” Later in ’92 Denise did a series of small paintings of skeletal and cranial forms as metaphors both of the human form and condition. It was clear that the artist was trying to arrive at a non-formalist abstraction of social relevance.

DC: I started with my responses to the sensuality of the convolutions of the brain. Then I saw an analogy with the ritualistic convolutions of daily life.

GNP: This sounds like ritual, not in the meaning of sense 1., but sense 2. as in habit or custom.

DC: On the other hand, the innumerable convolutions of the brain offered a metaphor for a certain freedom.

The paintings

“Vulva I.” Conch-like, it unfurls, expanding and contracting. There is a whorl and rivulets here. As a foil, think of Cézanne’s “Black Clock” in which the timepiece and a conch are reflected in a mirror. Time and sexual water, the pulse of a clock. Mesh and cotton netting are use here.

DC: Other organs contrast with the red verticals; my use of sand to build impastos. In this painting, I reminded myself of playing in the watery sand as a child. I think it was one of my freest expressions of sexuality.

“Abstractions.” An internal landscape in which marrow, gray matter, ligaments become a beneath-the-seascape swirling under celestial elements, nebulae. There is a shipwreck here: Turner’s wreck of the Slave Ship turned upside down; Neruda’s “Ode to the Storm.”

Last night
she
came,
livid,
night-blue,
wine red:
the tempest with her
hair or water…
newly unleashed…
her cavern in the sky…
the earth
moaning, a woman
giving birth,
in a single blow…
and when the lighting flashes
fell like hair…
and when we were about to think
the world was ending,
then,
rain,
rain…

(To finish this poem you need another painting.) So, let’s try “Forever.”  Painted forms both convoluted and convulsive, the skin of the cerebral earth erupts. It is phallic/chthonic. Shaft/cerebrum. Skull/womb. Scrotum/brain coral. Dylan would call this “the spark that lights the green life…”

GNP: This is graphic. The image here is intentionally artless – the vulgate of dick at war with the Latin of penis.

DC: I’m trying to say something about the invincibility and fragility of male sexuality. I want to reconcile things. You know Brazil – think of it.

rain for us men
for the forgetting
of the dead
and for tomorrow’s bread –
…I love you storm,
reckon with me...
illuminate me,
show me your path
so that the chosen voice of a man
may join and sing your song with you.

“Homeless.” Fetal forms in ultramarine and pthalo blue. Fetal/cerebric. The reds and gray/green lavender at the upper right vibrate. All is aflame. Small newspaper photographs, which represent the homeless are scattered in the vortices of swells built up with pigment, wire mesh screen and thick daps of silicon. Denise still has the need to be “social.”

“Growth.” The most literally visceral and metaphorically figurative painting in this series of the brain. The cerebral convolutions are intestinal, the brain reduced to a thing that receives what is already masticated; regurgitates, transcends itself and becomes a topography of volcanic crust. Against this theme – the built up impasto of translucent silicon medium heightens the evocation of new life forms bathing in amniotic fluid.

Out of fire comes life.