L'Esquive
The observer can browse through the screens and drawings of the fluminense artist Eloá Carvalho in Projetos da Minha Espera and find some tranquility and placidity (especially in such sadly agitated times). However, such perception is quite misleading. Not because it is her intended visual and conceptual 'trick' that would be used to such an artifice, but instead, through closer examination, because it is possible to verify the result of a consistent production which moves with disquietude, in continuous transformation. And after getting past a priori apprehensions, we can reach an interpretation that draws away from the forced pacification which discursively contaminates various areas of our daily experience. The work of Carvalho disorders - a lot.
What may confuse those who seek only harmony and ponderation is the silent configuration in which the graphic-pictorial protagonists traverse, in works of lesser chromatic ostensibility and with sparsely inhabited spaces, full of emptiness and whiteness. After all, where would be the chaos of these times of maximized circulation of images and information? Where would roam the fragments of this communication that seems to always be congested?
Well then. The disturbance may come from the space-time that averts linear parameters. In the series Quase Arquivo and Director's Cut, for example, the figures attending the ubiquitous exhibition opening events originate from various eras. They could not inhabit the same place. But how to rest in an environment where characters that seem to come from a unique mix of Antonioni's films and Embrafilme tapes, and to also cohabit with somewhat hipster 'actors' of our everyday lives - the latter increasingly more virtual - and where personas without physicality or avatars are considered to be so real and close?
At the same time, paintings such as Projeto para Cena ao Longe have the characteristic of functioning as atypical mirrors, causing a scale of 1: 1 to tease the viewer, suggesting the exploration of other planes within a desired extra-field. Such strategies help in the composition of what the artist describes as "subjective" and "unlikely" landscapes, and create fruitful dialogues between cinema, the photographic (through concepts such as framing) and the visual arts (emphasizing, with a contemporary view, the landscape genre itself).
And the production of the artist is pervaded by a kind of hesitant look, in the positive sense. In the construction of the scenes, the protagonists almost never gaze at us - there are many profiles, lateral perspectives. Architectural elements such as railings and walls are present, emphasizing the transience, in spatial configurations of tenuous substance. Everyday objects such as a bicycle or a backpack, help us in our identification, but on the other hand, distance themselves from that which is concrete, in environments in the interstices between the oneiric, the imaginary and the palpable. Disolving atmospheres, emphasizing psychological states of difficult precision, but of pungent sensations. Images that go away, come closer, look through, as a mysterious woman, whose features are perceived by means of the enigmatic blackness that absorbs and repels her. Something so dense and essential that it serves as a synthesis of this poingnant work of Eloá Carvalho.
Mario Gioia