“Disturbing and poetic.” The professor at the Universitat de València Rafael Gil points out as hallmarks of the works of Carmen Calvo (Valencia, 1950) their transgressive character and at the same time overflowing with a great poetic charge in the exhibition catalogue. The sample is presented on the occasion of the Julio González Prize awarded by the Generalitat Valenciana at the proposal of the IVAM Advisory Council. Over five decades, Carmen Calvo has been building and revealing a creative experience where disturbing, disturbing, mysterious and surprising images merge, which the artist filters and transforms into scenes where beauty is often reconstructed from humble and discarded objects. Ugly and mutilated.
The limits or frontiers between ugliness and beauty are blurred in the artist’s work. Her postcards with their images impregnated with kitsch are victoriously reborn in a great mosaic of shocking plasticity. We already know that beauty since Marcel Duchamp exhibited a urinal as a work of art has been under suspicion and quite discredited according to conservative and bourgeois taste. As Rafael Gil points out, “when modern art elevated everyday objects to the artistic category, it created a new thought for the object of everyday life, by presenting it under a meaning and point of view unknown until then.” In the work of Carmen Calvo, the teachings of the avant-garde and surrealist and pop cultures survive in an experimental continuum where arguments such as family, love and sex, life and death, violence and inequality are inserted, experiences that the artist rewrites incessantly using the most diverse means and techniques.
Nuria Enguita, director of the IVAM and curator of the exhibition together with Joan Ramon Escrivá, points out that “for the artist the world is a field of experimentation that allows her to trace multiple stories from an archive in continuous transformation”. “Showing the artist’s studio, opening the archive and taking it to the museum, is the action that gives rise to this project” says Enguita about the genesis of the exhibition. For the first time, a fantastic scenography unfolds before the visitor that recreates the artist’s workshop, a large baroque stage populated with all kinds of objects, figures of mannequins, antique dolls, old magazines, clippings, workbooks, shelves and chests of drawers that they keep the selective and fragmented memory of the artist.
Ode to the horror vacui or great altarpiece of wonders, the recreated studio exhibits the intimate landscapes, desires and fantasies of the creator. “Carmen Calvo’s works are not mere plastic work that yearns to represent the beautiful, nor are they an empty show, but they behave as personal stories that extend to all human beings underlines Rafael Gil. “By shamelessly displaying her deepest feelings, the artist manages to get to the bottom of the viewer.”
The exhibition presented by the Valencian center – which had previously dedicated two exhibitions to her in 1990 and 2007 – covers different periods of Carmen Calvo’s career. A selection of works belonging to the series Writings, Compilation and Reconstruction open the route of the exhibition. The use of plaster and a taste for archaeological inspiration distinguish the works, highlighting the work Silencio I II (I promise you hell) made up of dozens of white tombstones piled on a wall covered with daggers, a disturbing and gloomy scenario, evocation of the tragedy and memory of absences.
The echoes or consequences of the past pandemic are also present in the exhibition. During the months of confinement, Carmen Calvo took advantage of the time of isolation to re-watch many of the films, classic American cinema, Nouvelle Vague, horror films, that have been part of her cinematographic imaginary: Citizen Kane, Perversity, Repulsion, Dracula , The seed of the devil… Using the mobile phone camera, he captured fragments of the films, images of scenes, close-ups of faces, which now reappear as ghostly figures, building a new narrative and fantasy. iconographic fetishism.
The last room of the exhibition presents the installation Nature Shakes (2010-2018) made up of a large cube in the form of a dwelling populated by hundreds of terracotta fingers with their nails painted a bright red. Female fingers that seem taken from a surreal sequence from a film by Luís Buñuel or David Lynch. Seductive and threatening to anyone who enters their interior. The power of the beauty of transgression.
Carmen Bald
Curators: Nuria Enguita and Joan Ramon Escrivá. VAT. Valencia. www.ivam.es. Until January 15
