Jennifer Carvalho

Helena Anrather is pleased to announce Looking Perfectly Still, a solo presentation by Jennifer Carvalho, her second exhibition at the gallery. Carvalho’s paintings are exercises in selective rendering, where tender gestures of historical significance slide into the present moment. In referencing Antiquity and Renaissance imagery culled from the pages of well-trod textbooks and web-sourced imagery, Carvalho’s practice is like art historical archaeology, combing through narrative passages of information and time gone by. Oddly cropped and collapsed into shallow spaces, her paintings are interpretations estranged from their origin, unconventional and phantasmic. Each is a tangible investigation realized through the process of mining and removal. The artist considers how visual data circulates or vanishes, as is often the case. Palimpsestic surfaces bear traces of dried pigment made by a method of slow composition, where thin veneers of paint are built over time, like a cinematic long take. In this way, the paintings mimic the experience of a duration, where initial boredom transforms with sustained looking, and gradual shifts in materials, color, shape, and sound reveal the longer you look. This is not coincidental, as the framing is sometimes lifted from films by the likes of Agnes Varda, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Chris Marker. This malaise in viewing allows scenes to unfurl at their own pace, with gaps filled by imaginative conjecture. Carvalho’s Looking Perfectly Still gives way to a bizarre painterly cadence, where the anxiety of past and present come together to produce a newly dissonant narrative, fixed and idle, with the kind of stillness that lacks resolve.

– Claire Sammut