“Untitled”

Carlito Carvalhosa, with installations, sculptures and paintings, provides unusual ways of moving through contemporary art spaces.

His participation in Grupo Casa 7 marks the beginning of the artist's career. At the time, Carvalhosa worked primarily with painting. His paintings from that period were made with wax, pigments and oil paint, always in large formats. From the 1990s onwards, the artist turned to producing three-dimensional works in plaster, porcelain and wax, in addition to painting. Carvalhosa also produces installations, which became more present in his work from the 2000s onwards. In Regra de dois, he occupies the Eva Klabin house, in Rio de Janeiro, with furniture suspended by glasses and fluorescent lights; in A soma dos dias, presented at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, he creates an installation composed of fabric, aluminum, lamps and a program of performances that included two appearances by Philip Glass, among other musicians; in Palácio da Aclamação, in Bahia, he suspends a tree in the main space and occupies the entire building with the work entitled Roteiro. In the SOSO+ space, he occupies a commercial hall in downtown São Paulo with fluorescent lights; at Casa de Cultura Laura Alvim, he creates an installation where paintings on mirrors, fabric, wooden props and aluminum works coexist, forming a reflection on the landscape and memory.

In 2011, Carlito occupied the second floor of the MoMa in New York with the sound installation "Sum of Days", where the viewer walks through a white labyrinth to the sound of several microphones attached to the ceiling. Each day a microphone "recites" a new poem, leaving the poem from the previous day low, as if it were a whisper. This immersion in an architectural tunnel filled with voices reminds us of the immateriality of the passage of time.

His works have been exhibited at the 2nd and 11th editions of the Havana Biennial, the 18th São Paulo Biennial, and the 3rd and 7th editions of the Mercosul Biennial. His works are present in the collections of the MAM – Museum of Modern Art and MAC – Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Pinacoteca do Estado, all in São Paulo; the MAM – Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro and Bahia; the Museum of Contemporary Art of Niterói; the Itamaraty; the Funarte collection; and private collections around the world. He has held important solo exhibitions at the MAM in Rio de Janeiro in 2006; at the MAM in São Paulo and the MAM in Bahia in 2008; at the Palácio da Aclamação in 2010; at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo in 2010; at the MAC in São Paulo in 2013; at the Museum of Modern Art – MoMA, New York, in 2011, among others. Recently, he has had solo exhibitions at national and international institutions, such as Bulb end, St. Moritz Art Masters, Saint Moritz, Switzerland (2012); at Shift Sonnabend Gallery, New York, USA (2012); at Sonnabend Gallery, New York, USA (2014).

According to Marta Mestre, what interests the artist is “the relationship between space and the act of building. Mobilized by the artist, construction is a process of reordering the world before us, it is a support for chaos and, therefore, an activity of differentiation in the face of nature”. She adds that “his work is permeated by the idea of ​​sculpture as construction, a gesture of addition and subtraction to the void”.