A Post-Apocalyptic Aesthetic
by Silva Carvalho
Galeria Nuno Centeno is pleased to present Inner Games, an exhibition by the artist Luís Silva Carvalho.
Having produced a prolific body of work and explored various aesthetic approaches that have always been uniquely his own, the primarily painterly Luís Silva Carvalho has recently been developing a post-apocalyptic aesthetic.
Charles Olson said that ‘the future is our most remote past’. Luís Silva Carvalho does not say the same thing, but perhaps something very close to it. Differently, the discourse is purely visual and not verbal. In his most recent works, Luís Silva Carvalho says, ‘The future is our most distant present.’ In other words, this distant post-apocalyptic future can be observed or imagined in the present – by all those who have time to contemplate his latest canvases, that is.
Many of these paintings cannot be interpreted because chaos admits of no order (no pictorial syntax): they are colours that tell us nothing. They are all the colours of a fantastic rainbow, minus the arch. However, if we attempt to interpret these colours, we will perceive them aesthetically (from the Greek ‘aisthēsis’, meaning ‘perception’): here is what exists, a space reduced to galaxies; here is the universe as science describes it, or how it once was. And little by little, from painting to painting, forms that are familiar to us appear, without a world emerging. Not as we know them, but slightly different, as if that distant future were emerging through hybridity or metamorphosis.
Luís Silva Carvalho is not an Aristotelian painter, in that he does not work with a pre-established plan. As he puts it, creating his canvases is a process. He does not know what he is painting; he applies colours to the canvas and, through his sensitivity, observes which path he should take to explore all the possibilities that arise from creating an artwork. In other words, Luís Silva Carvalho is also an observer – the first one – because he intends to create something without knowing what it will be. This ‘what’ is far more important and fundamental than the ‘why’. Or, as Heidegger would say in another context, this ‘what’ has come to replace – albeit provisionally, since we are embedded in history – the ‘how’ and the ‘why’. As Heidegger emphasised, what presents itself to us reveals itself ‘without a how or a why’.
However, Luís Silva Carvalho cannot give us the unthinkable. As in science fiction, the future always takes the present into account. Consequently, the emerging forms appear incomplete compared to the present forms to which we are accustomed. Omission and excess are two characteristics of the profound ambiguity that thrives in Luís Silva Carvalho’s painting. These are pictorial and stylistic concepts. Given the importance of the profusion of colours that give rise to sporadic figurations, these unexpected figurations are the product of chance. Creation takes place in his aesthetic instinct and imagination. In his famous poem ISTO, Pessoa wrote, “Feel? Let the reader feel!’ Replace ‘reads’ with ‘sees’ and this verse aligns with the artist’s position – or perhaps it is not even necessary to do so, because here the observer’s seeing and reading merge. However, a correction must be made to Pessoa’s brilliant verse. Luís Silva Carvalho is not a modernist painter, with his ideology of ahistorical impersonality, among others. Luís Silva Carvalho may not feel, but he senses. One of the most relevant features of this post-apocalyptic aesthetic is the peaceful coexistence of the ‘post’ and ‘pre’ of sensing.
When one paints without a prior plan, one is not operating within the realm of teleology, or a visual and/or conceptual purpose. The painting does not move in any precise direction; it ends in utter perplexity. Without intending to, Luís Silva Carvalho commits an act of violence. But isn’t all art a form of violence? An opening, an imperious fissure in what did not exist?
Does the observer think about what they see in the painting or feel what is implied on the canvas? Or do they merely sense, as Carvalho did, that something is happening in this painting, a certain je ne sais quoi that challenges us? Are we not all like Mr Jones from Bob Dylan’s famous song “The Ballad of a Thin Man”, who vaguely sensed that “something is happening, but you don’t know what it is”? Luís Silva Carvalho’s paintings suggest that the ‘versus’ of nothing is not being, but everything. This indescribable explosion of colours allows us to perceive a sense of completeness within the frame, or in the absence of a frame, an abrupt void that resembles a precipice. Could an ‘everything’ and a ‘whole’ give rise to a new ontology?
In his most recent works, Luís Silva Carvalho informs us that the concepts of figuration and abstraction are no longer relevant. These concepts have become redundant; they have lost their productive power. The ambiguity of his paintings establishes itself in contemporary art as a space of contradiction or the fullness of coexistence, thanks to his gestures and attitude. This is not a transcendence or revolutionary transgression of the concepts that still prevail today and are considered modern. Luís Silva Carvalho acknowledges this problem or distinction. As Barthes would say, if art is to resist the arbitrariness of our time, it must find an unprecedented and eccentric third way. Furthermore, the ‘versus’ is structurally in harmony with its apparent opposition. This is why he proposes the extravagant as a solution to this problem, considering it ‘a subtle subversion’. Subversion does not equate to transgression. It is not a crime. It is not the transfer of personal frustration into art.
Luís Silva Carvalho did not go through phases, but eras. In his work, one finds openness, not isolation, and no fear of judging and reflecting on his human, social and artistic experience (etymologically, ‘weighing’). The painter is of his time, yet he also embodies ambivalence. He lives in the historical time with others – that is, cultural time – and in the time he himself has invented and continues to invent – that is, personal time. His entire body of painting unfolds between culture and personal experience. While accepting many influences from the past, he introduces something different into his compositions: those small or large mutations that identify him as a unique artist. It is in this respect that his entire body of work is revealed. Luís Silva Carvalho perceives temporality as the space for his aesthetic creation and has never confined himself to a single form or format.
The post-apocalyptic aesthetic does not belong to a distant future; it belongs to the present. If the concept and its illusion make sense, it is a ‘time machine’.
