2021

Cosmic Tones

CIAJG, Guimarães

When the pandemic forced us into the first unexpected lockdown, Francisca Carvalho (Coimbra, 1981) equipped herself with a book of medieval illuminations and sheets of Jaipur paper bought in India and plunged herself into singular landscapes. By resorting to the visual economy of medieval parchments, the artist scratched, traced and drew with oil pastels that
would literally liquify. She then added materials that impart depth, tactility and rhythm to the drawings. The impression of depth is given by drawings within drawings, outlines pouring out of outlines. Tactility comes from their appeal to touch, and rhythm from the fact that the drawings are centreless, spreading out in a circular, hypnotic choreography. Impure and devouring, like Saturn eating his own children, the thirty-one drawings presented by Francisca Carvalho in the exhibition Cosmic Tones at CIAJG seem to swallow up the days spent in lockdown. They fold and unfold over themselves and have the ability to generate a hiatus in linear time, claiming an engagement with the pandemic-threatened present. By not affiliating to any tradition or canonical expression, these drawings share a condition that is both strange and eccentric. For this reason, Francisca Carvalho’s compositions and figurations seem uprooted, i.e., hybrid and almost irregular as if belonging to distant geographies.