Rafael Carneiro | Homem-Natal e outras histórias…
Who is, for now, Christmas-man?
The works on view here clearly evince Rafael Carneiro’s interest in the materiality of the image as a fundamental element of their meaning. And you know what? Perhaps it has been this way from the very outset of his career. In his first paintings, in the mid-2000s, Carneiro was already drawing the viewer’s attention to the fact that meaning in his works arises not only from the images they suggest – whether a sunset, a scene of war, or an explicit sexual act – but also from the conditions of their making and their appearance in the world. Put differently, the semantic weight of a representation or visual reproduction is shaped, in part, by how it is produced and presented, depending on where it is seen and in what social, institutional, or ideological contexts. The materiality of the image, in short, alters its conceptual, moral, and symbolic meanings.
Then Carneiro continues to draw on such a wide range of material in his deliberately ambiguous painting practice: surveillance footage from a space agency, encyclopedia illustrations, photographs of cakes in cookbooks, stills from westerns, cartoon characters, children’s stickers, and stamps. In many works, especially up until 2021, he used a projector to enlarge these onto canvas as references for painting. At other times, he assembled collages based on these reproductions and then projected them onto the canvas, using these as a basis for his painting – sometimes even incorporating the patches of light cast by the projector onto the fabric of the work.
These various transfers of images – from one medium to another, from one register to another, from a photograph to a low-quality textbook reproduction, then to a projector, and from the projection to the painting – ended up disrupting the prior, “original” roles of each of those figures. Worn down by these transitions, they emerged in Carneiro’s work rendered with remarkable technical skill, yet at the same time emptied, enveloped in phantasmagoria, with a false – or at the very least uncanny – appearance. It was as if they were there without being there, like a vision, an apparition, imprinted or absorbed into those two-dimensional planes. It was as if they had become part of a universe that, unlike the ones they were removed from, is neither didactic nor narrative, neither pure entertainment nor simply the systematization of knowledge. A space where nothing is univocal, where there is no prior aim – not to instruct, arouse, or monitor, and not only to amuse, but also to disturb. What once was meant to instruct has come to serve above all to confuse.
From then on, Carneiro began to explore an ever-expanding range of possibilities in the physical makeup of his paintings – using gel-based mediums, natural pigments (from earth, for example), and alternating between acrylic, oil stick, and oil paint. These experiments connect with the research and material production carried out at the paint factory he co-founded in 2020 with fellow artist Bruno Dunley. Since then, his explorations have given the surfaces of his paintings an ever greater variety of forms, colors, consistencies, and textures. The process itself has centered on the exploration of these materials and what they mean for the language of painting, working directly with substances and testing diverse solutions in drawing, brushwork, and surface preparation – whether rough or smooth, shiny or matte, with multiple levels of reflectivity, opaque or translucent, thick or thin, smooth or rough, with uniform or irregular textures, and so on.
Matter, gesture, and image have therefore come to coincide in Rafael Carneiro’s recent paintings. This does not mean these elements are the same or a single thing – far from it. Each retains its own autonomy, yet all three assert themselves without hierarchy, with equal force and weight in shaping the works. This is precisely what makes these paintings dense. Not necessarily overloaded, but full of events. The properties of each area of the surface, for example, become events. The interplay between fullness and emptiness becomes an event. Some works are economical, made with only a few movements, while others are highly labor-intensive. In these, the forms remain open, unbound, more like the marking out of signs than the building of structures.
Other paintings, by contrast, are created in sessions or through an intense succession of actions: making, unmaking, and remaking in another way, then once again with further changes, and yet again. In this layering, the first decisions tend to reverberate in the background, visible through transparencies, among traces of gestures, figures, and smudges left behind at some point, but still active and participatory after the process has ended. The image never fully stabilizes, and the work, even when finished, never feels definitively complete. By this logic, the work never commits itself fully to either figuration or abstraction. There is no normative code that assigns a moral rating to the appearance of the word cu [ass] next to a wooden rocking horse. Nor is it accidental that these surfaces take on a gelatinous, elastic look – half-liquid, half-solid – with depths and profundities left uncertain. Everything seems on the verge of transformation, as if at any moment these things might turn, shift physical state, change consistency or form.
In these works, tensions arise in objects that convey a sense of saturation, while at the same time suggesting that they result from a series of assaults carried out with and against their own materials – as if beginning from a degree zero of language. These objects carry an awareness of art history, and of painting in particular, yet set their engines going from a kind of tabula rasa. The work lives between accumulations, a certain exhaustion, and the desire to carry forward thoughts and operations in continuous elaboration, without pause. The exhibition’s title, Homem-Natal e outras histórias… [Christmas-man and Other Stories…], misleads by suggesting there are narratives or definitive storylines to be told here. The works never reach the level of discourse. On the other hand, the name also suggests that each work is, or contains, a story – that its processes have sequences or an arc of events that could form a plot. In this sense, the works are indeed obscene in terms of how they expose their materialities and processes – which, being mismatched and contradictory, lack clear connections. Each work establishes its own specific conditions of production and presentation in order to do what has not yet been done in this practice: to reveal what has not yet been seen; to come to know something of the unknown. In this sense, yes, the stories remain open-ended and in dispute – not for writing, but for being in constant transformation.
José Augusto Ribeiro
