Carlito Carvalhosa (1961-2021) has become, since his untimely passing, a major reference among the Brazilian artists working at the beginning of the Twenty First Century. Known for his Proteus-like shape-shifting capacity to address all mediums at monumental dimensions, for his inventive transformation of exhibition spaces, for the rapturous architectural drive of his site-specific works, Carlito Carvalhosa’s installations became a turning point in the history of the genre in Brazil. The only Brazilian artist to have invested the main atrium of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Carvalhosa was since the beginning of his career a painter at his core, a painter of the paint’s flesh and bones, a painter of the inner body of painting.
Circa 1987, working with bee wax and resin, Carvalhosa addressed the raw materiality of the medium in an exercise of painting’s bereavement. By avoiding the conventional individuation of figures from his early work, Carlito Carvalhosa privileged the residual production of all-over fields where matter at its root and light as accident were complicit for a brave eloquence of abstract, monumental repertoire. A disposition towards the uncontrollable action of matter, its malleability, the uncertainty of forms embedded on it characterizes this early period of Carlito’s work as a painter. Equally important is the very body of each painting, both its three-dimensional objecthood as well as its inner thickness, its poetic guts.
This selection by Nara Roesler Gallery for TEFAF NY 2026 focuses on Carvalhosa mature achievements as a painter. For an artist who was capable to de-activate the regulating and binary concepts of formalist visual art -such as opacity and transparency, matter and form, reflection and trace, front and back, muteness and sound, flatness and fold, etc.- the peak of his painterly production, in the period 2010-2019, features a major resolution of such formal contradictions, translating into a figural stasis made of suave, dense organic, colorful figural presences on unconventional supports such as mirrors, aluminum and wax.
Carlito Carvalhosa addressed painting beyond all conventions: rather than artfully attacking an empty support as a tabula rasa, Carvalhosa knew that such thing is nothing but an illusion. For Carvalhosa all surfaces are already traced, marked, all matter is a proto painting. As such, he used all sort of instruments, combining incisions and spills, leaks and brushstrokes, but also thrusts and shots from the back of aluminum surfaces, producing creases and protuberances that beautifully compose the very body of the painting. The organic roundness of colorful surfaces, their subtle thickness, their brilliant and playful game of opacity, contrasting with reflecting intervals made one of the most daring and elegant body of abstract painting in the early 2000. From the formless of wax at his beginnings to wax as form at the end of his life, Carlito Carvalhosa was able, notably in his last body of works, multi-compositions of serial painted waxes, to conciliate the secular opposition between the concrete and the formless, so significant for the transformative legacy of Brazilian late modernism.