All the Ashes Belong to the Wind: Two Retrospective Exhibitions by Carlito Carvalhosa in São Paulo

Installation by Carlito Carvalhosa at Sesc Pompeia, São Paulo. Photo: Flavio Freire.

What’s the point of going out? We’re just gonna wind up back here anyway.

—Homer Simpson, The Simpsons, Season 7, Episode 14: “Scenes from the Class Struggle in Springfield”

To write your own history of art is to write through words that you cannot hear. Words that do not arrive yet never cease taking off, like transatlantic crossings in small conical forms. Solid blocks that someone, somewhere, might call Sugarloafs, mistaking these molds for transporting molasses with the layers of time stretched thin across mountains, reliefs, the back of sleeping giants in Rio de Janeiro’s geography from where suspended cable cars depart into the wind. But I am not writing about these words or these instants, about the Sugarloafs, the molds, the mountains, or the giants—even as they stand open, confused, hoisted in the middle of Sesc Pompeia in São Paulo, within Carlito Carvalhosa’s artwork.

I want to write about what Carlito Carvalhosa escapes and in what way he feels closest to me. The drip of his waxes, the touch of his encaustics, the swallowing of all things through the grease of his mirrors, what his white fabrics lay bare of my body in the here and now of space. “All the Sugarloafs were already here when I arrived,” he tells me, asking tenderly: Which came first, the mold, the mountain, or the architecture that unfolds art into the world and the world into art? Try again.

Try entering the birth of plaster in a furnace fueling the brightness of a white night, white like the walls of Instituto Tomie Ohtake. The many walls are revealed like negatives by the paints and enamels of the panels. Prints emerging from aluminum, in blue pigment like the ghost of a cyanotype, washing my eyes in the chlorine of suprasensory pools. I must not get distracted. I must keep working seriously to say even more serious things. Adorno might say that in this artwork, “the magical is crossed by the sign of freedom.”1 And perhaps this freedom explains how, amid so many things that fade, depart, and explode outside the gallery walls, there remains so much beauty to discover in the passage.

The passage of the exhibition from craft paper to enamel, the fiction of the image plane converting into the reality of the body. Guston dressed as Lygia Clark. The ferocity of Casa 7’s youth flowing into the waiting frames and glass boxes containing the collapse of hours in countless works of deferment. There is a world burning and remembering, sooner or later, merging trails and images. Tiny little fingers left in waxes, human protrusions over aluminum: someone was there, someone is there, someone wants to make me laugh amidst all that matter of life and weight. In all that it opens without ever being able to contain it and that survives from tomorrow to yesterday.

The surface speaks; the surface drags you along what Carlito pastes and unsticks, like an album of rediscovered photographs. The sum of his continuous and discontinuous steps, ruin of world to come, spread across the two galleries of Instituto Tomie Ohtake. The future lies in traces imprinted on the artworks between form and its impossibility, echoes of the traumatic collapsing matter of Kiefer, the anti-utopias of Richter, Carlito in 1990s Germany transmuting ten thousand anguished neo-expressionisms into the simple conviction of being here. The certainty that ruins cannot exist in the South Atlantic. He shapes them into constellations and transfigures all traces of the incomplete into the retrospective of beginning. To be with Carlito’s works is to always be at the beginning—of being in thing, of thing in being, of liquid solidifying into gaze, of the monochrome transforming into touch, the becoming encaustic of all that remains without ever being able to stay.

His intimate and precise constructions—of wax, glass, or plaster—are more than paradoxes or pretexts, more than intersections of mediums and aesthetic gestures. In their intimacy with the present, his works multiply beyond painting, sculpture, or any medium. Briefly, they are photographs, fragments that, in attempting to hold onto time, resemble forgetting. In his words, “always a form of imperfect reproduction, from representing nature to copying as a way of learning.”2 Learning to cease being aura or reproduction, amnesia of the instant or memory without body, to transfigure into presence the movement of someone shooting photos at the world while making themselves like the ferocious opening and closing of a Nikon FE’s shutter.

The lights change you; the lights wash you. The lights of Instituto Tomie Ohtake reflected in his wide paired optical lenses, in the searing white of his porcelains, and especially in the fluorescent lamps embedded in his works along the walls, recreating in their glow everything the gaze is not. To see Carlito is to refabricate your gaze. To unveil the borders of sclera and pupil, to expand into blindness where all lights and surfaces cause the white of images to condense. “Perhaps things transform more when they are white. White things have a certain plasticity; they can shift from one condition to another.”3

To pass ceaselessly, from vision to its absence, toward a deeper seeing in the hollow of his porcelains that, with their dark openings, are the most beautiful eyes in the world. Eyes in which one sees reality always on the verge of restarting. The eyes of an idol, where Alfred Gell sees spirits take on life and movement because “there is no definitive ‘surface,’ there is no definitive ‘inside,’ but only a ceaseless passage in and out, and that it is here, in this traffic to and fro, that the mystery of animation is solved.”4

Carlito’s white, then, is the ultimate consequence of a cartoonist’s trace from someone who once aspired to be a comic artist: a clouded confusion precipitating into BANG, CRASH, POW, BOOM. The white makes sound pour as rain, it lets itself be penetrated by its emptiness until it becomes a more profound form of listening. One listens in Carlito’s works, from his wax squares to the monumental installations. The sonic, as Wolfgang Ernst reminds us, “does not primarily refer to the apparent phenomenological quality of sound, but rather to its essential temporal nature, its subliminal message behind the apparent musical content.”5

For Ernst, what matters in the sonic is enabling “the most flexible and dynamic journey through time: a kind of uchronia rather than utopia.”6 The assertion of uchronia—literally “no-time,” “without Chronos”—is also the possibility of another time, a time beyond the gaze and the subject, interior and exterior, toward what overflows from being into matter, its sedimentation of intervals, pauses, and cadences. In Carlito’s work, there is the possibility of transmuting into the polyphony of the sum of days, forking paths in white fabrics, fingers on a piano, the flow of infinite passages, blindnesses, and waxes dripping, expanding, and retracting from the opacity of paint to the transparency of mirrors. The body of this other time, since his first sound work, A Flor e o Espinho (The Flower and the Thorn), traverses all his silences.

It is always a porous silence, a laughing void that pays homage to and tempers the voracity of the neo-concrete movement. If the suprasensory of Oiticica, Clark, Pape, and so many others arose from the “‘total perception’ of leading the individual to a ‘supra-sensation,’ the dilation of their usual sensory capacities, and the discovery of their inner creative center, their latent expressive spontaneity conditioned by the everyday”—here, that center is not expressed in apocalyptic joys or the mystical night of devouring and being devoured.7 The tension between body and flesh, the anthropophagic ouroboros that eats itself to feel itself, gives way to a now that conjures a dance in the sound of things.

It is a dance of the pigments and fingers. Outlined shapes over a rediscovered thing. Glasses tracing Persian carpets. White fabrics embracing us like arms stretched from the ceiling, letting fall the weight of the invisible; the legs of poles curving inward toward the building, in the dancing gravity where one thing fits inside another thing without ever being able to hold it. Neither floating nor collapsing, but waiting for a body to reveal something of the light and the nature of being there, between kicks and steps. To be there in Carlito is the way in which each person, in their own way, dances with the time they do not possess, continuing the journey through everything that widens and hides, into the depths of the invisible, the unfathomable, the eternal—for lack of a better name.

Carlito’s work affirms the monumental in the sense given by the architect of Sesc Pompeia, where some of his installations currently reside. “The monumental is not a question of size or ‘exaggeration,’” writes Lina Bo Bardi. “It is “rather a fact of collectivity, of collective consciousness. That which goes beyond the ‘particular,’ that which reaches the collective, can (and perhaps should) be monumental.”8 Monumental is the shy dance, at times clumsy but always precise, in which Carlito’s forms and accidents cross us like a wind stitching together Sesc Pompeia and Tomie Ohtake, the white walls and cold cement floors, a man and the world he left behind. Lina herself explains the miracles of Latin America: “America is an open society, with flower meadows and the wind that cleans and helps. Thus, in a crowded and wounded city, a beam of light, a breath of wind, can suddenly appear.”9 Wind in light, light in wind.

Carlito Carvalhosa will keep blowing through São Paulo for as long as his two retrospective exhibitions last, but also in what they weave beyond himself. In what they demonstrate and celebrate of every beginning in art. Beginnings that are always precarious, where one arrives too late or leaves too early, where the paraffin and the clay fall and are lost in the deep blue of the ocean depths and the intangible orange of the morning. No need to worry; all possible things are always there, in these timeless beginnings. Whether moving too fast or too slow, whether too early or too late to learn how to see, whether or not we know how to dance through the molds of experience, Sugarloafs, waxes, or the stars’ brightness—all their ashes belong to the wind. All the matter that we were, are, and will be, belongs to the same wind. The wind of those who fold art into the world and the world into art, end into beginning, life into love. Of those who stitch together what we see and do not see, who we knew and did not know. The words we cannot hear but never stop imagining. Thankfully.