ROSENDO, Catarina — “Isabel Carvalho”, in Tudo o que eu quero / All I want; artistas portuguesas de 1900 a 2020 / Portuguese women artists from 1900 to 2020, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisboa, 2021, pp. 304-306.
Portuguese
other texts
Isabel Carvalho completed a degree in Painting at the Porto School of
Fine Arts in 2000. There she was a student of painter Álvaro Lapa (1939-2006),
whose phrase "language will move away from consensus and express desire
and imagination" could well be used to describe the conceptual universe of
Carvalho's work, built on the tensions between visual arts and writing, and
centred on language and its creative and transformational potential. Her varied
means of expression include drawing, painting, objects, sculpture,
installations, collaborative practices, the conception and publishing of books,
posters and artist publications, and performative public readings. Through a
work process supported by scientific and speculative research and
methodologies, where the will to knowledge is inseparable from the imagination,
Isabel Carvalho explores language as a cultural construct, questioning the role
of contemporary artistic practices in the assessment of the role of non-verbal
communication, attention and a general (and radical) predisposition for care.
Until 2011, digital platforms such as the blog White Pony Cab, from 2005 to 2010, the development of participatory projects such as the community art residency A Casa é Sincera, implemented at the Arts Laboratory in Guimarães in 2007, and the Latido de Cachorro blog and subsequent book of short narratives Latidos, co-authored with her sister Ana Carvalho between 2009 and 2011, served to open the artist's field of work. In these years, Isabel Carvalho dedicated herself to organising community kitchens, selling books, performing music, giving spoken word concerts, maintaining blogs and websites and developing a practice of drawing influenced by children's illustrations and by the expressive immediacy of punk fanzines and teen graffiti.
While some proposals gave body to her investigation of desire and eroticism in the construction of female and queer identities, such as the Wanda blog of 2006, her works were generally based on the daily recording of banal events and focused on non-artistic presentation strategies, such as social media. Between indiscipline and post-discipline, blurring distinctions between high and popular culture and interested in amateurism and authorial and objectual expropriation, pursuing a kind of style without style, Isabel Carvalho became engaged with mediations that could shape meetings and exchanges of all kinds, relational flows without specially established codes or intended purposes.
Her collaboration with graphic designer Pedro Nora between 2007-2011, working together as the publishers Braço de Ferro, offered the artist a field of experimentation with one of her objects of choice, the book (particularly the artist's book), and with the world of publishing and printing in general. Operating on a self-publishing basis, besides producing records of the dynamic and independent Porto art scene of the time, Braço de Ferro facilitated ongoing production of graphic objects that were hybrids of documents and artworks, with an emphasis on low costs and wide distribution to ensure social and public dimension of the editions published.
A desire to transpose functional components and the logic of meaning inherent to books and the printed page to real space underpinned the project Navio Vazio [Empty Ship] of 2010-2012, which was a temporary, experimental and three-dimensional extension of the publishing house with a small rented room on Rua da Alegria in Porto, which served to present and sell graphic and editorial projects. Prepared each time as a meeting place and as a work in its own right, the space was stage to a plethora of superimposed functionalities (petit bourgeois domestic decoration, artistic installation, temporary exhibition, conversation, event launches and a bazaar) with the blurring of categories typical of this artist's work.
Navio Vazio further established the inseparability of Carvalho's work from a broader editorial production that continuously explored and developed the assumptions arising in her exhibitions. Carvalho's books and publications combine images with a wide range of literary genres, including essays, descriptive memoirs, short stories and even involving techniques related to Dadaist decoupages and literary concretism.
Such is the case with Os Cantores dos Planaltos Fundem Linguagens [Plateau Singers Merge Languages Together], from 2013, which was produced after a working trip to Essaioura, Morocco, and during an artist residency at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. The work aimed to explore the concept of "tropisms" developed by the French writer Nathalie Sarraute in 1932, referring to inner, semi-conscious movements that precede actions and words. The engraved plates that make up this wall object can be handled and/or read without pre-defined order. In each one of them, the representation of six sticks always in different positions is accompanied by a sentence with six words whose syntax the artist has constructed in a controlled random way through what she described as a "playful text-creating machine". Phrases such as "os empurradores de fronteiras comprometem tolerância" (boundary pushers compromise tolerance), "os agrupadores de abelhas constituem riquezas" (gatherers of bees constitute riches) and "as carpideiras de capital douram resignações" (mourners of capital gild resignations) point to an increased concern with politics, ecology and economics, while simultaneously exploring the complementarity of verbal and visual languages in a production of meaning that seeks dynamic relationships that can retain and amplify the complexities of subjectivities involved in communication processes.
These themes are continued in the works Léxico CB [Lexicon CB] (2019) and Nomeação de CB [CB's Appointment] (2019), which refer to Clara Batalha, a heteronym used by Carvalho since the Navio Vazio period as a fictional collaborative component for some of her works. A private educator involved in geometry, decorative arts, publishing, beekeeping and environmental activism, with a name that represents an entire programme of intentions, "Clara Batalha" [Clear Battle] refers to a fusion of human and natural sciences that promotes free investigation in language and its foundations, based on the relationship of the body with objects and things in the world and their sounds. In the manner of concrete poetry and revealing, among other things, an indebtedness to another Portuguese artist dedicated to language, Ana Hatherly (1929-2015), from whom Isabel Carvalho sought the title of her publishing project Leonorana, which began in 2017, the transformation of literary signs into graphic signs highlights the mimetic and synaesthetic performativity of language.
The artist's predisposition for word games, anagrams and the semantic multiplicity of language is also evident in her latest series of works, "Ar(a)c(hné)-en-ciel", of which Interjeições [Interjections] is part. Here, a study of the physiological, cognitive and social conditions of language and, in particular, of speech and hearing, serves as a pretext for using the spider (from the weaver Arachne of classical mythology) and the rainbow (arc-en-ciel) to explore the structure of textuality and its capacity to simultaneously constrain and liberate the body and its multiple representations.
Selected Bibliography
Boletim 1: O artista-editor. Edição e espaços independentes/Bulletin 1: The Artist-Editor. Edition and Artists-Run Spaces, edited by Mário Moura and Ricardo Nicolau, Fundação de Serralves, Porto, May 2019.
CARVALHO, Isabel (ed.), Leonorana 1, 2, 3, artist's edition, Porto, 2017-2019.
___, Orla, edited by Isabel Carvalho, n.p., artists' edition, n.d.
___, Os Cantores dos Planaltos Fundem Linguagens/Plateau Singers Merge Languages Together, Broken Dimanche Press, Berlin, 2013.
___, Relevos/Reliefs, Künstlerhaus Bethanien GmbH, Berlin, 2014.
Until 2011, digital platforms such as the blog White Pony Cab, from 2005 to 2010, the development of participatory projects such as the community art residency A Casa é Sincera, implemented at the Arts Laboratory in Guimarães in 2007, and the Latido de Cachorro blog and subsequent book of short narratives Latidos, co-authored with her sister Ana Carvalho between 2009 and 2011, served to open the artist's field of work. In these years, Isabel Carvalho dedicated herself to organising community kitchens, selling books, performing music, giving spoken word concerts, maintaining blogs and websites and developing a practice of drawing influenced by children's illustrations and by the expressive immediacy of punk fanzines and teen graffiti.
While some proposals gave body to her investigation of desire and eroticism in the construction of female and queer identities, such as the Wanda blog of 2006, her works were generally based on the daily recording of banal events and focused on non-artistic presentation strategies, such as social media. Between indiscipline and post-discipline, blurring distinctions between high and popular culture and interested in amateurism and authorial and objectual expropriation, pursuing a kind of style without style, Isabel Carvalho became engaged with mediations that could shape meetings and exchanges of all kinds, relational flows without specially established codes or intended purposes.
Her collaboration with graphic designer Pedro Nora between 2007-2011, working together as the publishers Braço de Ferro, offered the artist a field of experimentation with one of her objects of choice, the book (particularly the artist's book), and with the world of publishing and printing in general. Operating on a self-publishing basis, besides producing records of the dynamic and independent Porto art scene of the time, Braço de Ferro facilitated ongoing production of graphic objects that were hybrids of documents and artworks, with an emphasis on low costs and wide distribution to ensure social and public dimension of the editions published.
A desire to transpose functional components and the logic of meaning inherent to books and the printed page to real space underpinned the project Navio Vazio [Empty Ship] of 2010-2012, which was a temporary, experimental and three-dimensional extension of the publishing house with a small rented room on Rua da Alegria in Porto, which served to present and sell graphic and editorial projects. Prepared each time as a meeting place and as a work in its own right, the space was stage to a plethora of superimposed functionalities (petit bourgeois domestic decoration, artistic installation, temporary exhibition, conversation, event launches and a bazaar) with the blurring of categories typical of this artist's work.
Navio Vazio further established the inseparability of Carvalho's work from a broader editorial production that continuously explored and developed the assumptions arising in her exhibitions. Carvalho's books and publications combine images with a wide range of literary genres, including essays, descriptive memoirs, short stories and even involving techniques related to Dadaist decoupages and literary concretism.
Such is the case with Os Cantores dos Planaltos Fundem Linguagens [Plateau Singers Merge Languages Together], from 2013, which was produced after a working trip to Essaioura, Morocco, and during an artist residency at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. The work aimed to explore the concept of "tropisms" developed by the French writer Nathalie Sarraute in 1932, referring to inner, semi-conscious movements that precede actions and words. The engraved plates that make up this wall object can be handled and/or read without pre-defined order. In each one of them, the representation of six sticks always in different positions is accompanied by a sentence with six words whose syntax the artist has constructed in a controlled random way through what she described as a "playful text-creating machine". Phrases such as "os empurradores de fronteiras comprometem tolerância" (boundary pushers compromise tolerance), "os agrupadores de abelhas constituem riquezas" (gatherers of bees constitute riches) and "as carpideiras de capital douram resignações" (mourners of capital gild resignations) point to an increased concern with politics, ecology and economics, while simultaneously exploring the complementarity of verbal and visual languages in a production of meaning that seeks dynamic relationships that can retain and amplify the complexities of subjectivities involved in communication processes.
These themes are continued in the works Léxico CB [Lexicon CB] (2019) and Nomeação de CB [CB's Appointment] (2019), which refer to Clara Batalha, a heteronym used by Carvalho since the Navio Vazio period as a fictional collaborative component for some of her works. A private educator involved in geometry, decorative arts, publishing, beekeeping and environmental activism, with a name that represents an entire programme of intentions, "Clara Batalha" [Clear Battle] refers to a fusion of human and natural sciences that promotes free investigation in language and its foundations, based on the relationship of the body with objects and things in the world and their sounds. In the manner of concrete poetry and revealing, among other things, an indebtedness to another Portuguese artist dedicated to language, Ana Hatherly (1929-2015), from whom Isabel Carvalho sought the title of her publishing project Leonorana, which began in 2017, the transformation of literary signs into graphic signs highlights the mimetic and synaesthetic performativity of language.
The artist's predisposition for word games, anagrams and the semantic multiplicity of language is also evident in her latest series of works, "Ar(a)c(hné)-en-ciel", of which Interjeições [Interjections] is part. Here, a study of the physiological, cognitive and social conditions of language and, in particular, of speech and hearing, serves as a pretext for using the spider (from the weaver Arachne of classical mythology) and the rainbow (arc-en-ciel) to explore the structure of textuality and its capacity to simultaneously constrain and liberate the body and its multiple representations.
Selected Bibliography
Boletim 1: O artista-editor. Edição e espaços independentes/Bulletin 1: The Artist-Editor. Edition and Artists-Run Spaces, edited by Mário Moura and Ricardo Nicolau, Fundação de Serralves, Porto, May 2019.
CARVALHO, Isabel (ed.), Leonorana 1, 2, 3, artist's edition, Porto, 2017-2019.
___, Orla, edited by Isabel Carvalho, n.p., artists' edition, n.d.
___, Os Cantores dos Planaltos Fundem Linguagens/Plateau Singers Merge Languages Together, Broken Dimanche Press, Berlin, 2013.
___, Relevos/Reliefs, Künstlerhaus Bethanien GmbH, Berlin, 2014.