“To talk of the narrative in Antonio Claudio Carvalho’s work is, at once, both obvious and extremely superficial. The written word, whether referring to names of artists and writers or to quotations, is completely integrated into the figurative whole. It is the result of the special configuration of the image displayed in lines or areas included in the overall composition of the painting. This form of integrating discursive elements within the pictorial space shows the evolution of the painted image’s destiny, and this amalgamation is the fruit of interaction between globalised, electronic information media. This is a reaction of pictorial sensibility when faced with the alteration of our perceptive structures due to contact with telematic informational bombardment.
As well as a bold colorist, Antonio Claudio Carvalho is a precise and accurate draughtsman, who has developed an extremely personal synthetic calligraphy. Some compositions recall comic strips, but the all over synthesis of the image possesses its own very particular characteristics. In fact, it is as though interaction between the written and the painted in the artist’s work seems to operate to the rhythm of immediate thought association. I believe that painting such as this would have been inconceivable before the 1980’s and the subsequent informational bombardment by electronic media.
What particularly interests me about this artist is the way in which he transmits a conceptual message by means of his immediate iconic translation. The “word-image” even becomes the comprehensive visual vehicle for art history. Art culture meets pictorial passion head-on. I think Antonio Claudio Carvalho’s vision anticipates a future aesthetic sensibility based on a new mix of the intellect and the visual. In the reading of certain works, I have the impression of being transported to the ultimate in conceptual plenitude, embodied by the idea. In addition to “word-image”, one could also refer to “word-idea” and “word-colour”, and I feel a sense of intense satisfaction at this challenge to my own perceptive structure. Perhaps this should be seen then as a safeguard for the painted image when faced with the hegemonic onslaught of televised images.
Antonio Claudio Carvalho, poet-historian of global art, proves himself to be a protagonist in the great debate on the current destiny of the image.”
Pierre Restany
Paris, February 2003.
