Antonio Claudio Carvalho | Século XX (2004)
Antonio Claudio Carvalho | Século XX (2004)
ANTONIO CLAUDIO CARVALHO
From Jan 20 to Feb 28 2004
For Antonio Claudio Carvalho, the twentieth century is red; the colour which Kandinsky said conveys "the feeling of loud drum beats". Curiously, the painting installation ?Where Have All The Flowers Gone?? emerged after Antonio Claudio Carvalho heard this music (of the same name) for the first time, sung by Marlene Dietrich. The song, composed by Pete Seeger in 1956, became an important anti-war anthem, recorded by many artists throughout the years.
"Where Have All The Flowers Gone?" created in Carvalho?s imagination of the beat of Kandinskyan drums, totally permeated by the theme of war, as opposed to the gentle tone of the original song. It was these war drums which drew him to red, the colour of blood and, metaphorically, the colour of violence. The same colour which exploded in the centre of Goya?s painting The Second of May, 1808, after the Spanish master "heard" the ardour of the people of Madrid?s fight for independence, and this same colour was again spilled upon the ground in his painting The Shootings of May 3rd, which is, for many, the most dramatic historical picture in Western Art.
Creating an all over red surface, as Matisse did, but in addition imbueing it with the fury of a Goya, Antonio Claudio Carvalho forces us to think about the red of human conflict and that phantasmic quality also evident in films by Bergman (Cries and Whispers) and Kubrick (The Shining).
Art, music, poetry, photography, diverse areas of cultural expression, are reflected explicitly in Carvalho?s work. Exhibiting mainly outside Brazil (he lived eight years in London and still divides his time between Brazil and Great Britain), the artist?s work is a synthesis of his artistic references, resulting in a kaleidoscopic configuration of the Western modernist tradition.
Constantly creating a pictorial amalgam of figure and word, Carvalho has shown himself to be, above all, an extraordinary colourist, replying to Barnett Newman, that he is not afraid of colour. These large areas of red were already evident in paintings such as Duchamp?s First Wife, 2000, The Marriage of Leonardo and Monalisa, 2001, and in Talking to Jesus, 2001, in which he makes a cutting commentary on the events of September 11th
Following on from the spontaneity of the Surrealist?s automatic writings and reviving that interest in children?s art, which so fascinated Miro and Picasso and which, to the present day, is evident in the work of Keith Haring, Donald Baechler and Jean Michel Basquiat, Antonio Claudio Carvalho?s painting, on the other hand, possesses clear political references which reminds us of Brazilian Pop Art. It seems that, since the 1960?s, we have not seen such strong politically weighted images as his.
Unique within his body of work, "Where Have All The Flowers Gone?" comprises his first large series, consisting of twelve big canvases, plus another forty four smaller canvases in different colours, based on a single theme. This series utilises an economy of elements which many of Carvalho?s paintings have previously demonstrated, (even though there are numerous others which are made up of an accumulation of images), in addition maintaining an emphasis on colour and reattributing to the written word the status of visual signs, in line with the conceptual route begun by Magritte.
"Where Have All The Flowers Gone?" mixes painting, words, music and photography. On to the enormous atmospheric red surfaces are introduced fragments of photographs taken during wars which were fought throughout the last century. A Vietcong prisioner in Saigon, a child in a Nazi concentration camp, a fighter wounded in the Spanish Civil War, the student uprisings in Paris and Rio de Janeiro, and numerous other images repeat, in unison, each in its own language, the famous question which is insinuated, in different versions and idioms, by the background music.
The uniformity of the red, the use of black in all the figures, the same repeated phrase, in short, the whole grand scale of the installation is based on the same, constant evil which has epitimised the last century: war.
With an economy and simplicity of means, comparable to the title song, Antonio Claudio Carvalho makes "Where Have All The Flowers Gone?" into a banner of the ?red? world which envolves us. He re-introduces to the field of painting an already well worn theme but with the intelligence of one, who lends to violence and its repudiation the finer forms of art commentary. Saturn devoured his children, but only Goya could transform this mythical scene, with all its violent splendour, into poetic language. "Red" still devours us, and Antonio Claudio Carvalho with his contemporary vision and well-known images seems equally to expose the horrors of the world through the power of his colour.
Ligia Canongia