Pantalons pour attirer le vent

Publication for the exhibition Pantalons pour attirer le vent by Francisca Carvalho, curated by Antonia Gaeta, on view at Pavilhão Branco from September 26, 2023, to January 7, 2024. It brings together essays by Antonia Gaeta, Emanuele Coccia, Francisca Carvalho, Sara Antónia Matos and Pedro Faro, and Sara De Chiara. The publication also features exhibition views, several photographs of the works, and colored pencil drawings, some of which were not part of the show, that the artist brings forth as foundational to this series.

“Guadalupe, do you hear me?
With a flute in your mouth and a tambourine in your hand, you ride a scabbard fish in the company of a fox with a long, bushy tail. The clouds seem to be a lie, tuffs of greenery up to the neck, roads of stone and dust. Jean, the white-socked cat has gone, and us? You go, you go, I´ll go next; the road is still long. A certain melancholy has engulfed me. Under the flowery branches of the pomegranate, one survives, thanks to a deep love or bitter irony.”
— Antonia Gaeta

“Carvalho seems to return to these temporal latitudes to make painting a kind of space in which images, all images meet and mingle. It is not an archive; it is something more radical. And it is not just an aesthetic extravagance: it is a reaction to the new condition in which we find ourselves.”
— Emanuele Coccia

“These drawings are mixtures of signs, shapes, characters, things that suddenly appear, including Ruy Leitão’s tweed. It was like talking to friends alive and deceased, by telepathy. Then came the large gouache formats, made on the floor. The mixture continues but without wandering. The scale already implies sprawling, asking for decision and grains of slumberland. I remember Bollywood posters, open kimonos, wooden-block prints from Jaipur in full-length strips of cloth, hand-drawn advertising from the 1930s, a Christ by Cimabue in Florence that I found by chance in a cloister, the painter Phan Cam Thuong. Waves and ripples—ukiyo-e.”
— Francisca Carvalho

“The artist’s works are animated by intriguing combinations of diverse fragments, seemingly non-narrative, which are explored for their serial potential. They highlight a process that involves the distortion of conventional space and time, making an absurd game of and celebrating these all at once and generating singular and vertiginous re-compositions. They are poetic, one can say. They are not about one thing or the other, but exist and resist, imposing themselves upon us and making us stop to think and explore them in their meanderings.”
— Sara Antónia Matos e Pedro Faro

“The wind seems to have functioned as an accomplice in the creation of the paintings in the series Pantalons pour attirer le vent, made in gouache on large sheets of paper in 2023, presented in the exhibition. If we can identify the wind as the craftsman of the choreography that, for example, moves the fans in Abanicos as if they were leaves scattered on the tiled ground in a domestic (and ironic) symphony of autumn, the same seems to have contributed, in a more subtle way, to the “disjointed” composition of some of the paintings in the series, acting more in the drafting and spatial organization than in the subject matter.”
— Sara De Chiara