Liste Year
Year of Birth
Country of Birth
Presented by
2021
1980
Canada
Franz Kaka
The depth of relief
Jenine Marsh on the paintings of Jennifer Carvalho for Liste Showtime 2021
The paintings of Jennifer Carvalho are of small spaces and unknown times. The close-cropped depictions of ruins and relief sculpture, statues and flowers belie context. While an initial impression might be of careful, tenderly rendered representations of iconic and idyllic beauty, Carvalho’s worlds slowly reveal themselves to be strangely claustrophobic.
A painting is the time that it takes to look at it. Immobilized in front of a painting, we wander into its image without our bodies, visually, cognitively. The medium’s adherence to the rules of its canvas, to the fixity of its surface, allow us this imaginative trip. Carvalho’s works magnify and concentrate this effect, where one’s vista narrows only to a small window, a walled garden, or the finger-breadth depth of relief sculpture. There in the shallow field of layered and obscured paint marks, is the layering and obscuring of time, stretching out endlessly, while paradoxically, simultaneously, collapsing on itself. As in painting, so in contemporary reality: the present is made of images of the past. Like picturesque ruins that are maintained but never repaired, time and space stiffen and dry. The present-tense is only again and again representation, where nothing new grows.
Carvalho’s paintings are the miniaturization of a certain dark utopia explored by feminist writer Silvia Federici, in which “the creation of a disembodied humanity is now openly upheld as a social ideal” where “bodies and worlds are drifting apart.”[1] But so disembodied, modes of agency become entirely virtual, rather than tangible. Psychically wandering within these painted layers, in the garden-world of fantasy and folly, we find only the smallest wriggle-room for agency’s play.
Cultural theorist Mark Fisher writes, “the tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism.”[2] Carvalho’s muted palette and soft renderings of stone sculpture seem to be veiled by this suppressing grey curtain. However, since Fisher’s book was published in 2009, the communally shared despondency he wrote of now seems quickly to be transforming into dread, not just of the hopeless sameness of globalized capitalism, but of impending climate and social collapse. The paintings of Jennifer Carvalho accommodate this growing terror, in the pent silence and stasis of a held breath. Invoking the limitations of her medium, Carvalho patiently, tenderly, seeks the narrowest of tears in the painted veil, a time and space where embodied agency might still enter.
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[1] Silvia Federici, Beyond the Periphery of the Skin: Rethinking, Remaking, and Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism. 2019.
[2] Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism. 2009.
Jennifer Carvalho graduated from University of Guelph in 2013. Recent exhibitions include Helena Anrather, New York; Union Pacific, London; Franz Kaka, Toronto; The Embassy of Canada, Washington D.C.; Georgia Scherman Projects, Toronto; Montreal Museum of Fine Art, Montreal; and The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. In 2020 Carvalho was an artist in residence at The Banff Centre, Banff, AB. She has been awarded numerous prizes including Mary E. Hofstetter Legacy Fund for Excellence in the Visual Arts, Banff Centre; Toronto Arts Council Visual Artist Program, Toronto Arts Council; Research and Creation Grant, Canada Council for the Arts; and The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant. Her work is in public collections, including RBC, Corporate Art Collection, Toronto; TD Bank Financial Group, Corporate Art Collection, Toronto; Art Gallery of Hamilton, Hamilton, ON; and Scotia Bank, Corporate Art Collection, Toronto. Carvalho lives and works in Toronto.