Francisca carvalho, “Scale of squares”
Watercolor and graphite on paper
2010
30 x 42cm
(unframed)
Francisca Carvalho completed in 2004 the Advanced programme of Visual Arts at Ar.Co, Lisbon and in 2016 her MFA at MICA ( Maryland Institute College of Art) in Baltimore (USA), in 2009 she graduated in Philosophy at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa (Lisbon). She has since been developing her work in the fields of painting and drawing, most recently exploring processes of natural dyeing on fabric that she learned in India during a research trip funded by Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and Oriente Foundation.
Her works are a mental fusion of pictures she collects across cultures (paintings, drawings, fabrics, artifacts, or everyday objects) with her readings and the music she listens to. They create paths to the intimate discovery of oneself interacting with one’s milieu.
Francisca´s drawing process is daily-based, intuitive, metabolic and aims to bridge the gap between conscious verbal language and the symbolic realm of the unconscious, full of images.
Along these lines, her spontaneous works on paper that she is presenting in this exhibition are like ethereal letters addressed to other beings – alive or deceased – letters whose subject remains undefined but which, once assembled, unfold like a story made of cloudy sensations that becomes clearer in the process of making.
“While making watercolor and graphite drawings, I feel closer to marking-making; as if I was there when the symbols and signs were created, and as if they were still rooted in my body, that is why they are metabolic. You follow an action, a gesture… and all the gestures have a memory, a bodily sensory memory, and this memory becomes a kind of writing on its own.”
Francisca Carvalho ́s exhibitions include the Centro Internacional das Artes José de Guimarães; Galeria Municipal de Almada; Duplex AIR, Lisbon; Brotéria, Lisbon; Culturgest, Porto; Chiado 8, Lisbon; the Istituto Centrale per la Gráfica in Roma, Italy; the Handicrafts and Handlooms Museum, New Delhi, India; the Kerala Museum, Kochi, India; Outono Projects, NY. Her works are part of private and public collections including Portuguese State Commission for the Acquisition of Contemporary Art, Fundação Carmona e Costa & Figueiredo Ribeiro.
